Abstract
Despite the growing amount of research on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FL/OSS) development, there is little insight into how structural factors associated with institutions influence the patterns of software developer activity in this area. This article examines some of the dynamics of the development of this type of software and the extent to which these dynamics are associated with features of the gift economy as is frequently suggested in the literature. Drawing on an empirical analysis of contributors to the GNOME FL/OSS project, we suggest that greater attention should be given to the emergence of a mixed economy in which features of the exchange economy come to the fore with implications for the power relationships among those contributing to FL/OSS.
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Notes
- 1.
See http://www.gnome.org.
- 2.
See research on the dynamics of commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led free/open source software projects, Berdou (2007).
- 3.
- 4.
See Berdou (2007) for details of the methodology. Questions were asked about members’ overall and principal areas/modules of contribution, affiliation, GUADEC attendance, city of residence.
- 5.
A tar archive, or tarball in jargon terms, is a group of files compressed together as one, which is used to package source code distributions.
- 6.
The data were validated by two long-term GNOME contributors. See Berdou (2007) for details of the methodology. This data coding scheme was also validated by two long-term contributors.
- 7.
‘Affiliated’ or ‘paid’ refers in this context to a developer employed by an organization actively involved in FL/OSS development. A volunteer is a contributor who is not employed by such an organization. This therefore does not mean that all volunteers are unemployed, but simply that they are not remunerated to participate in FL/OSS development.
- 8.
As in the case of the GNOME Foundation members ‘affiliated’ or ‘paid’ refers in this context to a developer employed by an organization involved in FL/OSS development.
- 9.
In terms of the overlap between the two networks there were 27 maintainers who were not members of the GNOME Foundation and 42 maintainers who were not among the Foundation respondents.
- 10.
This is necessary since taking into account all three categories of maintainership results in too high a percent of expected frequencies under 5, resulting in a loss of statistical power (for an explanation, see Field (2005)).
- 11.
The calculation of the odds ratio allows us to gauge the effect size, how strong a relation is, for categorical data. See Field (2005, p. 693).
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Mansell, R., Berdou, E. (2009). Political Economy, the Internet and FL/OSS Development. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_21
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