Volunteers in Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects such as Debian collaborate to produce common-pool resources. Debian is commonly defined as an ‘ethical’ project as participants are meant to be motivated by self-fulfilment, and to oppose restricted ownership and control. In recent years firms have increasingly engaged with ethical projects by hiring programmers to develop F/OSS code. For example, Google adopted Debian as its internal operating system in 2017. What does the hybridising of closed and open institutional logics (discursive orders, worlds, economies?) mean for project cohesion and sustainability? In order to unpack the strategies deployed by waged employees to justify the growing presence of capitalist interests in projects, this paper presents the results of a 2016 survey of 1500 Debian contributors, and of in-depth interviews conducted in 2017 with Debian developers who are employed by firms to produce or maintain open source code. We find that the ethical logic of ‘coding for code’s sake’, which presupposes that programmers are earning wages somewhere else, is being challenged by new institutional arrangements.

About the presenter:

Mathieu O’Neil is an Associate Professor, Communication, at the University of Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are multidisciplinary, incorporating communication studies, the sociology of fields and controversies, online research methods, social network analysis, and labour and organization studies.

Mathieu previously held academic appointments at the Université Stendhal - Grenoble 3, the Université Paris Sorbonne and the Australian National University, where he contributed to the founding of the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON). Mathieu has also worked as a researcher for the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and as a magazine editor and exhibition curator. In 2010 he founded the online Journal of Peer Production. He can be found on Twitter @mathieuoneil.

Mathieu's research has been published in Social Networks, Information, Communication & Society, Réseaux, and Organization Studies, amongst others. His latest book, Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism: The US Matrix was published by Palgrave in 2015.