Biografia del relatore

Yuwei Lin, PhD (York, UK), originally from Taiwan, is a research fellow at the Department of Information Systems at the Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands. She is also a research associate at the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) at the University of York, UK. Her research interests centre on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), digital culture (particularly in the topics of online communities and computer hacker culture), sociology of innovation and organisational dynamics.

Abstract

This paper seeks to answer the enquiry: How do firms collaborate with the community, and maximise both of their productivity in crafting Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)? It raises some qualitative questions about the meanings and values of the collaboration between firms and the community in the FLOSS social world. It will contribute to the mutual understandings between the private and the public sectors, namely firms and the community, and enhance the trust inter- and intra- users, developers and firms. It aims at creating new concepts in the organisation studies and e-commerce model. To avoid confusions and debates, I define 'commercialisation' as a process to make profits. Therefore, 'commercialised software' referred to here is the one aimed at bringing in profits.

Although causality and structure are still very much visible in an innovation model, "the creative capabilities of a firm to do something new, and to take risks with unknown possibility of success, rests fundamentally on recognition of a problem as an opportunity." (Jackson, Mandeville & Potts 2002). Sociologically speaking, it is exactly the diverse choices and recognitions of problems shape the different innovation patterns. Since actors in the innovation process are not given fixed label/identity, their cognitions of problems and solutions vary along with their socio-technical positions. "The history of the IT industry certainly is a wonderful vision of the evolution of an autocatalytic knowledge set, catalysed by the actions of a diverse set of agents, driven by a diverse set of motives, all resulting in an explosion of economic activity and an avalanche of creation and destruction. The heart of this process of creative destruction is the epistemic cycle of uncertainty, imagination and innovation." (ibid.: 329).

To get a grasp on the heterogeneity and contingency in the innovation process, this paper emphasises the everyday practices and the socio-technical interactions between actors in software engineering. The FLOSS development, like HCI and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in computer science, works "at the organisational level, deciding includes issues of social justices, multiple interpretations, and adjudication of conflict across social boundaries" (Star et al. 2003: 242). These decision-making activities are based on a constellation of collective open source practice (for brevity, I refer to the open source practice as the OSP) shared amongst individuals, companies and organisations in the FLOSS social world. This constellation of OSP, based on my observation on the FLOSS social world, refers to practices associated with both the FLOSS consumption and production. Some common ones, such as reading source codes (e.g. the often appeared acronym "RTFSC" (Read The F***ing Source Code) put by someone obnoxious and overly-complacent on the mailing lists or wherever virtual discussion fields), reporting bugs to maintainers/developers to revamp programmes, configuring users' own systems, cannot be done easily without the availability of source codes. Others correspond with other practices on the Internet and related ICTs, such as sharing information via mailing lists, contributing knowledge onto wiki site, making one's blog pages to document experiences, and so on.

This highly fluid, flexible and contingent innovation pattern I suggest, concentrates on the socio-technical heterogeneity and association in scientific culture and practice. Boundary objects such as source code, programmes and projects are "actively 'crafted' in a process of 'mutual enrolment', and that the production of successful boundary objects reacts back upon the social worlds thus linked and upon the larger whole they make up, reconstituting the very objects of study, as well as the material, conceptual, and social practices that surround them" (Fujimura 1991). The social worlds theory "offers us an image of the interactive stabilisation of a plethora of cultural elements, while enriching our understanding of that process […] on the new patterns of intersection and circulation that come into sight when one recognizes the social heterogeneity of practices." (Pickering 1992). This line of reasoning will be in the heart of the paper.

To conclude, this paper analyses the development of GNU/Linux through the co-production of the public and the private sectors. Unlike innovation based on a strong professional culture involving close collaboration between professionals in the academic sector and corporations, FLOSS entails a global knowledge network, which consists of 1) a heterogeneous community of individuals and organisations who do not necessarily have professional backgrounds in computer science but competent skills to understand programming and working in a public domain; 2) corporations. Through analysing how agents in the FLOSS community and the OSS corporations work together and examining their socio-technical practices, artefacts and cultures, the paper identifies an alternative innovation pattern quite distinct from that found in conventional technological innovation systems.