Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I draw upon data I gathered during ethnographic research to explain the involvement of corporate actors in popular FOSS projects. I argue that high knowledge requirements create barriers that substitute ownership and that allow governance practiced by a narrow group of actors.

Paper long abstract:

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement can be characterized as revolving around the central value associating source code with freedoms related to speech rather than property. The movement is seemingly at odds with the current modes of capitalist production. However, we can observe intensive involvement of corporate actors in popular FOSS projects. This paper aims to explain the coexistence of such contradictory tendencies.

I draw upon data I gathered during ethnogrpahic research in a FOSS project and attempt to foreground the backstage elements of work practice - to make an infrastructural inversion. I describe programming as a practice that, through compiled programs, assembles and delegates action in a durable form to multiple places - user's computers. In this process, software tools serve to translate unpredictable flows of work into standardized units, delegate them to public places and make them connectable - easily includable into other compositions.

While such infrastructure greatly reduces the transaction costs of software development, it also places high knowledge requirements on potential contributors. Thus, although the licensing typical for FOSS projects systematically suspends the rights traditionally associated with ownership, the rights are actually practiced by a narrow group of actors who hold specific types of knowledge. As a result, there seems to be a close relationship between ownership and knowledge. Such form of "practical ownership" allows the most involved actors to steer the direction of software development - to practice governance of a FOSS project to the extent that it allows them to generate profit.