Political Economy, the Internet and FL/OSS Development

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.

[1]  Pamela J. Hinds,et al.  Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of the Linux Kernel , 2002 .

[2]  Lee Sproull,et al.  Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of the Linux Kernel , 2000, First Monday.

[3]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[4]  Robin Mansell,et al.  Political Economy, Power and New Media , 2004, New Media Soc..

[5]  Christopher Freeman,et al.  The Economics of Hope: Essays on Technical Change, Economic Growth, and the Environment , 1992 .

[6]  James Curran.  Media organisations in society , 2000 .

[7]  Christopher Freeman,et al.  Technology, progress and the quality of life , 1991 .

[8]  Magnus Bergquist,et al.  The power of gifts: organizing social relationships in open source communities , 2001, Inf. Syst. J..

[9]  Greg Elmer,et al.  Critical perspectives on the internet , 2002 .

[10]  D. Smythe.  On the Political Economy of Communications , 1960 .

[11]  Stefan Koch,et al.  Effort, co‐operation and co‐ordination in an open source software project: GNOME , 2002, Inf. Syst. J..

[12]  Nicholas Garnham,et al.  Emancipation, the media, and modernity : arguments about the media and social theory , 2000 .

[13]  C. Lindblom.  Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society , 1992 .

[14]  Brian Fitzgerald,et al.  Understanding open source software development , 2002 .

[15]  Andy P. Field,et al.  Discovering Statistics Using SPSS , 2000 .

[16]  P. Kollock.  The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace , 1999 .

[17]  N. Garnham.  Contribution to a political economy of mass-communication , 1979 .

[18]  R. Silverstone.  Why study the media , 1999 .

[19]  Nikolai Bezroukov,et al.  Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism) , 1999, First Monday.

[20]  R. Silverstone,et al.  Consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces , 1993 .

[21]  Marleen Wynants,et al.  How Open is the Future?: Economic, Social and Cultural Scenarios Inspired by Free and Open-Source Software , 2005 .

[22]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[23]  R. Mansell,et al.  Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity , 2000 .

[24]  E. Hippel.  Horizontal Innovation Networks - By and For Users , 2007 .

[25]  Pamela J. Hinds,et al.  Distributed Work , 2002 .

[26]  Manuel Castells,et al.  The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society , 2001 .

[27]  Vijayan Sugumaran,et al.  A framework for creating hybrid‐open source software communities , 2002, Inf. Syst. J..

[28]  Eric S. Raymond,et al.  The cathedral and the bazaar - musings on Linux and Open Source by an accidental revolutionary , 2001 .

[29]  C. Freeman,et al.  As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution , 2001 .

[30]  Danny Miller,et al.  The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach , 2000 .

[31]  P. Kollock,et al.  Communities in Cyberspace , 2002 .

[32]  Robin Mansell,et al.  The Debate over Critical vs. Administrative Research: Circularity or Challenge , 1983 .

[33]  Michael J. Gallivan,et al.  Striking a balance between trust and control in a virtual organization: a content analysis of open source software case studies , 2001, Inf. Syst. J..

[34]  Jan Ljungberg,et al.  Open source movements as a model for organising , 2000, ECIS.

[35]  A. Mattelart,et al.  Networking the World, 1794-2000 , 2000 .

[36]  David Lancashire.  Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development , 2001, First Monday.

[37]  Steven Weber,et al.  The Success of Open Source , 2004 .

[38]  Nicholas Garnham,et al.  Media, culture and society : a critical reader , 1986 .

[39]  Sonia Livingstone,et al.  Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment , 2000 .

[40]  Eric S. Raymond,et al.  The magic Cauldron , 1999 .

[41]  James G. Webster,et al.  The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model , 1996 .

[42]  C. Haythornthwaite,et al.  The Internet in Everyday Life: An Introduction , 2008 .

[43]  Stephen Fox.  Communities Of Practice, Foucault And Actor‐Network Therory , 2000 .

[44]  S. Livingstone,et al.  Handbook of new media : social shaping and consequences of ICTs , 2002 .

[45]  P. Golding,et al.  Theories of Communication and Theories of Society , 1978 .

[46]  William H. Melody,et al.  The Information Society: Implications for Economic Institutions and Market Theory , 1985 .

[47]  Robin Mansell,et al.  New Media Competition and Access , 1999, New Media Soc..

[48]  Jean-Michel Dalle,et al.  Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software Mode of Production , 2004 .

[49]  M. Poster,et al.  What's the Matter with the Internet? , 2001 .

[50]  P. David.  The Evolving Accidental Information Super‐Highway , 2001 .

[51]  B. Wellman,et al.  The Internet in everyday life , 2002 .

[52]  Paul A. David,et al.  Community-Based Production of Open Source Software: What Do We Know about the Developers Who Participate? , 2008 .

[53]  Timothy Roscoe,et al.  The construction of the World Wide Web audience , 1999 .

[54]  P. David.  Economic policy analysis and the internet: Coming to terms with a telecommunications anomaly , 2006 .

[55]  James S. Ettema,et al.  AudienceMaking: How the Media Create the Audience , 1994 .

[56]  Eric S. Raymond,et al.  The Cathedral and the Bazaar , 2000 .

[57]  Joseph Lampel,et al.  The Role of Status-Seeking in Online Communities: Giving the Gift of Experience , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[58]  M. Castells.  Die Internet-Galaxie , 2001 .