History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Ursula Holtgrewe & Raymund Werle
Dept. of Sociology, University of Duisburg
Duisburg
Germany
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Köln
Germany
e-mail: uholtgrewe@aol.com, werle@mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de
De-commodifying software? Open Source Software between business strategy, participatory engineering and social movement
Focusing on Open Source/ Free Software this paper examines the origin, development, social organization and the process of de-commodification in an industry that has traditionally relied on a variety of technical and legal provisions to protect intellectual property. Open Source Software denotes a co-operative and voluntary mode of software development cross-cutting organizational boundaries and transcending relations of market exchange. It is both technologically and culturally reinforced by the Internet, which in considerable parts depends on non-commercial operating systems and software.
Starting with the "Open Systems Movement" in the late 1970s, which was driven by business strategic and industrial policy interests, and complemented by a spirit of mutual support in professional (engineering) communities, a social movement type of collective action has emerged which claims to develop knowledge as a public good. This movement is made up of competent communities sharing the norms of the hacker and Internet culture and co-operating in non-hierarchical relations. Their activities are not restricted to developing software but generally challenges the boundaries between private property and public goods. But the open source idea has also been absorbed and transformed into a business strategy by companies who provide basic software products for free and involve users/ customers in the further development of products. Profits then result from products which complement and augment the public domain basic software.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006