Social Science Research Council

To date, research on the Free and/or Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement has been oriented mostly by the improbable fact of F/OSS’s existence. The development of complex software through highly distributed, mostly-volunteer collaboration ran against a number of standard economic expectations of how people behaved and how large-scale production could be organized. It demanded explanations: who contributes and why? What do contributors gain from it? Is the process sustainable? Is it translatable to other contexts? How does it relate to other forms of economic organization—notably the firm?

This project, conducted in 2005 and 2006 sought to do something different. We proposed that, at this stage of open source development and advocacy, we can begin to ask a different set of questions—not how open source works as a social and technical project, or whether open source provides benefits to a range of constituencies (in terms of cost, security, etc.), but rather how open source is becoming embedded in political arenas and policy debates. F/OSS adoption is increasingly a matter of politics and public policy—within public and private institutions, within municipalities and government agencies, and increasingly within political parties and national governments. It has become a subject of discussion within a wide range of international organizations, from the European Commission to UN agencies to forums like the World Summit on the Information Society. These conversations reflect the modest success of open source advocates in connecting F/OSS to a variety of broader political and social goods—economic development, the transparency of government functions, privacy of data, forms of local autonomy and agency, and of course, cost.

These encounters generate a wealth of political experience that is going mostly unrecorded, and with it a significant dimension of the history of F/OSS. F/OSS development and F/OSS adoption have been so rapid and have proliferated in so many different contexts that systematic accounts, much less comprehensive maps of the process, have been elusive.

We have tried to step back from the task of explaining or justifying F/OSS in order to ask how these increasingly canonical explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political contexts. We have solicited eight contributions from participants in and observers of F/OSS politics in different public institutions and political venues. In keeping with our notion of the utility of a ‘map’ of political processes, we have structured our account according to

Different venues and sites of adoption:

Challenges to F/OSS's viability and F/OSS community responses:

This is an avowedly partial account, intended to invite and provide a template for elaboration. We created an editable wiki version of the report, with an open invitation to readers to help extend this account of F/OSS politics—adding to or revising the existing accounts, branching out into new accounts of other contexts and processes, or linking to relevant external sources.  This wiki is now closed to editing, but we would welcome ongoing solo or collaborative contributions to the work.  A full pdf (1MB) of the report can also be found on the wiki.

The project was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation.