Political Economy, the Internet and FL/OSS Development

Abstract

Despite the growing amount of research on free/open source (F/OS) software development, there is little insight into how structural factors associated with institutions influence the patterns of software developer activity in this area. This chapter 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 F/OS 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 F/OS.