We’ve been recently covering a number of studies that shed light on the influence of the corporate world on peer production.
Oekonux has created a page that aims to clarify some of the subtleties that should be taking into account when examining/measuring that influence.
In particular, it offers an interesting typology of paid and unpaid work and how it may be related to the voluntary contributions.
Stefan Merten:
Careful consideration of paid time
What people confuses mostly is that there are Free Software developers which are paid by their companies for their development efforts. Or to be more exact: That they work for Free Software during their paid time. However, that people do something during their paid time does not say everything about the relation of their employers to what they do – think of coffee breaks for an example.
I think there are a number of types of Free Software development during paid time which needs to be distinguished:
* Non-official work: That is when people work on Free Software on their spare time without knowledge of the management. This can be the case when you use a certain Free tool during your job and improve it as a side effect to your normal work and give the improvements back to the community. This also applies to Free tools developed during a job.
* Half-official work: There may be times when people are not working on a job project because there is no order at the moment. In these times management may give people the opportunity to work at their own projects which may be Free Software. Google even has an official 20% share of such time.
* Non-competetive work: If you work in the software sector then you know that often there are tools you use but which are not of competetive interest to your customer. For instance in a big company you may develop a Wiki engine for the Intranet but the core business of the company is in a totally different sector – such as finances for instance. In that case the management may allow that in-house development be public Free Software.
* Competitive work: This is the case when a company officially engages in a Free Software project because it has manifest interests in this project. For instance if a processor vendor engages in the Linux kernel to make it run on his processors. Then the employees not only officially work for the company in the Free Software project but also this is relevant to competition.
Only in the last case I see the danger of alienated influences from paid labor. And even then it should be distinguished whether these influences are more useful or more harmful for the community.
Careful consideration of non-paid time
If develop Free Software during non-paid time then it seems to be clear that this must be based on Selbstentfaltung. However, there might be cases where people during their non-paid time they do things in the interest of commercial interests – be it in their own interest or in the interest of their company.
A useful survey must try to make a distinction here as well as it does for paid time.”
Andrew Morton had an interesting overview of why companies pay free software developers, already back in 2004:
“In the Linux kernel project, pretty well all of the main developers are working fulltime for technology companies of one form or another. The days of the bearded geek working in his basement purely for his own satisfaction are long gone on such projects.
Companies pay staff engineers to work on open source software products for several reasons.
– because they have a commercial interest in the quality of those products.
– so they have some leverage on the product’s future feature set.
– so they have staff at hand who understand and can support the product.
– if they manufacture hardware: so the product supports that hardware well.
– Rather than directly hiring their own engineers, companies will also fund open source development by entering into contractual arrangements with other parties, mainly Linux distributors, for all of the same reasons. The main distributors of Linux are employing a large number of world-class engineers who work purely on open source products.
– Companies who contribute to open source projects place their engineers into a peer-to-peer relationship with the rest of the development team, thus gaining influence over the project and total visibility into the development and planning processes.
All these good things do not come for free. They only really come when the company (or, more specifically, individuals within that company) become recognised contributors to the project.”