Social Aspects of Non - Proprietary Software as an Example of Coordinated but Non - Institutional Technology and Knowledge Production
10 Pages Posted: 18 May 2011
Date Written: 2003
Abstract
Since Richard Stallman has founded the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and at least since Open Source – especially LINUX – gains more and more users, economical success (Wheeler 2003) and public awareness, benefits and risks of non-proprietary software are widely discussed – in scientific as well as in public debates. Most times, those discussions are focused on the LINUX-WINDOWS antagonism, some times on non-proprietary software as part of a solution of the digital divide, and increasingly on the economical opportunities that particularly are revealed by LINUX and Open Source.
The development of non-proprietary software is a coordinated and globalized but not institutionalized process which is the main difference to scientific knowledge produc-tion. Non-proprietary software is produced by single persons or (sometimes large) groups of volunteers. In most cases one can find so called maintainers who coordinate the software production process but there are no responsible persons in a moral or legal sense. Often the concept of responsibility is completely rejected by members of the non-proprietary software community as well as the idea that the production of non-proprietary software should be institutionalized.
This paper shall give a brief history of Free Software and Open Source, then shall de-scribe the social aspects of the non-proprietary software community in more detail and address possible problems which could arise, for instance, for public funding of non-proprietary software development or for concepts of responsibility in the ethics of tech-nology. Finally, a possible future of non-proprietary software shall be outlined, which strongly differs from the bright forecasts of the mainstream Open Source and Free Software supporters.
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