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ABSTRACT
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement has been a crucial source of inspiration and theorization for the contemporary rediscovery of the commons. However, its growing organic integration into the industry, into the market and into a group of innovative forms of capitalistic competition is challenging the early interpretations of this phenomenon and, at the same time, is shedding new light on the forms that these new commons can take and on the potential role they will play in the new productive arrangements that are emerging on the frontier of the digital revolution. This article engages with these new evolutions and develops innovative approaches to this phenomenon. Specifically, it makes an original contribution in two directions. The first is by developing a new framework for analyzing the relationships between commons and markets. The framework is organized under three concepts: semi-commons, shared infrastructures and creation of ecosystems. As a whole, the framework highlights the importance of studying these new commons within hybrid combinations of regimes of property and economic appropriation. The second contribution is the development of interpretative keys for analyzing the evolution of the FOSS ecosystem. This is carried out through the experimental application of two frameworks of analysis to this phenomenon: the multi-level perspective and the theory of the techno-economic paradigms. These contributions allow us to draw conclusions regarding new directions for research and policy on FOSS and the new commons.
Notes
1. This association could be argued further. Beneath the big monopolies that have been growing in the last decade on the Web, we find precisely a massive use of FOSS which has been a vehicle for the cheap building of the large infrastructures – data centers in first place – that have sustained the process of “platformization” of the Internet, which characterize its current highly concentrated architecture. This evolution points to a paradox that is often overlooked: FOSS’s open access regime did not prevent, and instead facilitated, its value being unequally exploited and appropriated.
2. There is here a contradiction to be noted between two schools of thought on commons, rarely addressed. Benkler (Citation2013) is one of the exceptions. Much of Ostrom’s work was in fact intended to refute Hardin’s famous The Tragedy of the Commons (Citation1968). And one of Ostrom’s central criticisms of Hardin was that he confused resources in an open access regime with commons, which according to Ostrom involve a system of governance of the access to the resource and a community that is in charge of it. And among the principles that Ostrom outlined for an effective governance of commons stands out the principle of a clearly defined boundary in the community of users authorized to access and use the resource. But this characterization of the commons does not apply to digital commons that are precisely open access. Ostrom’s approach has limited significance for these commons. One crucial difference is that digital commons typically flourish around resources that are non-rival. Therefore, they are not threatened by the risk of overexploitation and depletion, which is the central dilemma both in Hardin and in Ostrom’s studies. Rather, as various authors have pointed out, the looming tragedy for these commons is, on the contrary, a scarcity of use, adoption and development. Weber (Citation2004) has also coined a neologism to characterize this type of goods: “anti-rival”. This means that the more people that share these goods, the greater will be their value for everyone. Instead, these commons have more similitude with another tradition of thought and another phenomenology of commons, such as roads, waterways and public squares, which Rose described in her The Comedy of the Commons (Citation1986) as “inherently public property”, emphasizing their availability to all in nondiscriminatory terms. Basically, these two traditions of thought on commons clash. In a way, Rose’s commons are not such for the Ostrom’s school, which would frame them as open access goods. And vice versa. In fact, according to Rose (Citation2003), Ostrom’s commons – shared resources only accessible to a circumscribed community of users – maintain on the outside the characteristics of an exclusive property.
3. This is what Bauwens and Kostakis (Citation2014) call the “communism of capital” paradox. The more – they argue – “communist” the sharing license, the more the corporations can use it for free.
4. For a more extended presentation of these concepts, see Berlinguer (Citation2018), which builds this framework through a detailed analysis of two cases: Linux and Android.
5. The General Public license, for example, does not allow the building of proprietary derivatives, which instead is allowed by more “permissive” licenses like Apache or MIT licenses. However, the GPL allows several other strategies, based on the same two-tiered logic. The business model of Red Hat, for example – the company recently acquired by IBM – relies basically on a Linux distribution, which is governed by a GPL license (Birkinbine, Citation2017).
6. Likewise, any private property is nested within some kind of commons. This is a new understanding that the “rediscovery” of commons has made possible and that the notion of semi-commons allows to visualize: the ubiquity of mixed systems (Fennell, Citation2011).
7. For a recent application of such an approach, based on the case of Wikipedia, see Lund (Citation2017).
8. See note ii, for an example, among the many that can be found in the growing, but somewhat “cacophonous” (Coriat, Citation2015), literature on the commons.
9. Indeed, it is unavoidable here to call Marx into question, for his focus on the forms of ownership as a signal and lintel of the historical succession of social relations of production and modes of production.
10. It is not that there has been a lack of public programs to support FOSS projects. It is that no good model has emerged to date. See on this, Berlinguer (Citation2020).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marco Berlinguer
Marco Berlinguer lives in Barcelona, where he collaborates with the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and teaches at the Escuela Superior de Cine y Audiovisuales de Catalunya (ESCAC). He has a degree in Philosophy (La Sapienza University, Rome), a Master in Information Society and Knowledge Economy (Universitat Obierta de Catalunya, Barcelona) and a doctorate in Public Policy and Social Transformation (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona).