Introduction

Lund, Arwid; Zukerfeld, Mariano

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28219-6_1

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This emphasis on the permanent openness to commodity form was another confirmation of a more general insight that ‘enclosures are characteristics of capital’s strategies at whatever level of capitalist development’ (De Angelis, 2006: 133–135). With the Open Source licences and movement, capitalist firms were invited to shape their business models in ways that harness open cooperation and blurred organisational boundaries while strategically closing down under copyright technical aspects that gave them business advantage (Ettlinger, 2014; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). The process resulted in drastic changes in the composition of the leading actors: already in mid 1990s ‘the academia-dominated, collegiate, programmer league of past years stands in stark contrast to the competitive, multinational, big business software industry of today’, and ‘this seismic shift has led to ideological conflicts over the scope and propriety of software intellectual property protection’ (Castner, 1997: 36–37).…”

Section: Public Wealth and Commodities In Software And Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

Prug,

Žitko

2023

Critical Sociology

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Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital.

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Section: Public Wealth and Commodities In Software And Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

Prug,

Žitko

2023

Critical Sociology

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“…One approach understands corporate involvement as an exemplification of the value that free labor provides in the digital economy (Terranova, 2000). In this view, corporate involvement is seen as a ploy to extract free labor from both willing and unwilling subjects (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Velkova, 2016). A second approach frames FOSS as bait that companies use to lure in users who are then monetized in other ways (Fourcade and Kluttz, 2020; Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2019).…”

Section: Understanding Corporate Involvement In Fossmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chromium as a tool of logistical power: A material political economy of open-source

Zhang,

Carpano

2023

Big Data & Society

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Open-source software is used by almost all technology companies and has become an integral part of the technical infrastructure of digital capitalism. Generally, developers of open-source software have been viewed as a social movement at odds with the capitalist profit motive. This idealized view has been challenged as companies have made significant investments in open-source since the early 2000s. Current research frames corporate participation in open-source as fundamentally extractive in nature, failing to account for these sizable investments. Through a historical analysis of Google's Chromium browser project, we provide another way to understand corporate participation in open-source. This article takes a material political economic approach to argue that control of open-source projects can grant companies logistical power that enables them to influence standards and shape the Internet as an infrastructure for digital capitalism.

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“…Terranova’s (2000) work on “free labor,” to which I will refer in the following section, emphasizes the connections between open source software projects and moneyed interests in the tech industry, suggesting that the open source developer community provides freely available benefits to business, such as bug fixes and access to a wide variety of codebases, that would be unaffordable otherwise. Similarly, Lund and Zukerfeld (2020) argue that by exploiting language and commonly held ideals surrounding “openness” and “sharing,” companies are able to take advantage of unpaid labor in order to turn a profit.…”

Section: The Open Source Ethosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…appearance of authenticity [which] is central to retaining the trust and loyalty of youthful consumers” (p. 33), where “[t]he easy rhetoric of coproduction and cocreation conceals a reality of exploitation” (p. 32). Lund and Zukerfeld (2020) more directly outline the use of language related to “openness” in corporate practices, suggesting that this terminology is intentionally used to mask an inherently exploitative business model which relies on unpaid labor and engagement in order to sustain itself.…”

Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate power, and the open source ethos

Vasudevan

2021

New Media & Society

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The “open source” model initially emerged as a way for programmers to collaborate on efforts to build and share code, but has since evolved to embody an ethos of sharing and cooperation that pervades software development as a whole. As many technologists have seen, however, a philosophy of openness can leave them vulnerable to attempts by large corporations to use the norms of open source communities for their own benefits. This article examines the breach of social trust that occurs when companies do not fulfill expectations of reciprocity in their relationships with open source communities, and instead attempt to co-opt their work for monetary gain. Through analysis of three case studies, I seek to emphasize the often misleading nature of these processes and show that they are directly incorporated into the business models of large corporations, even if they are not openly acknowledged as such.

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Introduction

Cited by 4 publications

References 30 publications

Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

Chromium as a tool of logistical power: A material political economy of open-source

Share and share unlike: Reciprocity, corporate power, and the open source ethos

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