‘Open source has won and lost the war’: Legitimising commercial–communal hybridisation in a FOSS project

O’Neil, Mathieu; Muselli, Laure; Raissi, Mahin; Zacchiroli, Stefano

doi:10.1177/1461444820907022

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Indeed, many of the most widely used and influential OSS projects are maintained by companies and paid individuals [68]. In this way, OSS ecosystems can be thought of as a co-production of volunteers and companies [69]. Policymakers seeking to promote the use of OSS should consider these aspects of sustainability [70].…”

Section: Intervention Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Interconnected Social and Technical Risks in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Schueller¹,

Wachs²

2022

Preprint

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Open source software ecosystems consist of thousands of interdependent libraries, which users can combine to great effect. Recent work has pointed out two kinds of risks in these systems: that technical problems like bugs and vulnerabilities can spread through dependency links, and that relatively few developers are responsible for maintaining even the most widely used libraries. However, a more holistic diagnosis of systemic risk in software ecosystem should consider how these social and technical sources of risk interact and amplify one another. Motivated by the observation that the same individuals maintain several libraries within dependency networks, we present a methodological framework to measure risk in software ecosystems as a function of both dependencies and developers. In our models, a library's chance of failure increases as its developers leave and as its upstream dependencies fail. We apply our method to data from the Rust ecosystem, highlighting several systemically important libraries that are overlooked when only considering technical dependencies. We compare potential interventions, seeking better ways to deploy limited developer resources with a view to improving overall ecosystem health and software supply chain resilience.

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Section: Intervention Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Interconnected Social and Technical Risks in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Schueller¹,

Wachs²

2022

Preprint

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“…The principles of sharing economy, rooted in collaborative, prosocial, and anti-commercial ideals [ 75 ] have also been used rhetorically and adjusted for the mainstream economy, leading to further exploitation and inequality [ 76 ]. In a way, FOSS movement has both “won and lost the war” [ 77 ], as it has been widely accepted as a form of software development, but the profits deriving from it have largely been appropriated by corporations. In its 2.0 version, FOSS development becomes yet another business model [ 78 ], bordering freemium more than a revolutionary society-changing movement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free and Open Source Software organizations: A large-scale analysis of code, comments, and commits frequency

2021

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As Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) increases in importance and use by global corporations, understanding the dynamics of its communities becomes critical. This paper measures up to 21 years of activities in 1314 individual projects and 1.4 billion lines of code managed. After analyzing the FOSS activities on the projects and organizations level, such as commits frequency, source code lines, and code comments, we find that there is less activity now than there was a decade ago. Moreover, our results suggest a greater decrease in the activities in large and well-established FOSS organizations. Our findings indicate that as technologies and business strategies related to FOSS mature, the role of large formal FOSS organizations serving as intermediary between developers diminishes.

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“…Such open, free knowledge commons would then enable distributed logics of development and wealth creation. Many such efforts however were subsequently capitalised on by firms, indeed contributing to technologies that have since become hugely centralised (Bodó, 2019;O'Neil et al, 2020;Szulik, 2018).…”

Section: Economicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralisation: a multidisciplinary perspective

Bodó¹,

Brekke²,

Hoepman³

2021

Internet Policy Review

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Decentralisation as a concept is attracting a lot of interest, not least with the rise of decentralised and distributed techno-social systems like Bitcoin, and distributed ledgers more generally. In this paper, we first define decentralisation as it is implemented for technical architectures and then discuss the technical, social, political and economic ideas that drive the development of decentralised, and in particular, distributed systems. We argue that technical efforts towards decentralisation tend to go hand-in-hand with ambitions for rearranging power dynamics. We caution, however, against simplistic understandings of power in relation to the decentralisation-centralisation spectrum, and argue that in practice, decentralisation might very well be served by and produce centralising effects. The paper then goes on to discuss the critical literature that highlights some of the common assumptions and critiques made about decentralisation and the pros and cons of a decentralised approach. Finally, we propose some of the missing parts to current debates about decentralisation, and argue for a more nuanced and grounded approach to the centralisation/decentralisation dichotomy. Issue 2This article belongs to Concepts of the digital society, a special section of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Christian Katzenbach and Thomas Christian Bächle.

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‘Open source has won and lost the war’: Legitimising commercial–communal hybridisation in a FOSS project

Cited by 18 publications

References 36 publications

Modeling Interconnected Social and Technical Risks in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Modeling Interconnected Social and Technical Risks in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Free and Open Source Software organizations: A large-scale analysis of code, comments, and commits frequency

Decentralisation: a multidisciplinary perspective

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