Employees of the web giants contribute most to open source software

Emer­gence and insti­tu­tion­al­isa­tion of open-source software

The his­tory of free soft­ware began in the 1980s, in reac­tion to the dom­in­a­tion and new restrict­ive prac­tices in terms of freedoms of soft­ware pub­lish­ers. Aca­dem­ics defined four freedoms that they believed should be applied, which became the prin­ciples of free soft­ware: free­dom of use, the free­dom to study the code and adapt it to one’s needs, the free­dom to redis­trib­ute cop­ies, and the free­dom to improve the pro­gram and pub­lish those improve­ments. In order to pre­serve the free nature of this soft­ware, they also developed the leg­al sys­tem of « copyleft ». Instead of using copy­right restrict­ively, by pla­cing soft­ware under licenses designed to exclude use and access to the source code, copyleft con­sists instead of more per­missive licenses, but requir­ing the avail­ab­il­ity of the source code¹.

The prin­ciples of open source soft­ware com­bined with the demo­crat­isa­tion of the Inter­net allowed the rise of a col­lab­or­at­ive devel­op­ment mode² in which geo­graph­ic­ally dis­tant volun­teer developers formed com­munit­ies around soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­jects that com­peted with the so-called « pro­pri­et­ary » offer­ings: the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem, the Apache web serv­er or the Moz­illa web browser. But bey­ond a new devel­op­ment meth­od, the free soft­ware move­ment is first and fore­most a philo­sophy and val­ues of shar­ing, inde­pend­ence and freedom.

Although pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware pub­lish­ers, led by Microsoft, saw the free soft­ware move­ment as a threat and ini­tially tried to dis­cred­it it, it was rather its insti­tu­tion­al­isa­tion that we wit­nessed in the 2000s. In 2002, IBM began to invest in free soft­ware, which gradu­ally gained legit­im­acy among com­pan­ies. Today, IT com­pan­ies [for « Inform­a­tion Tech­no­logy »] have embraced free soft­ware, and espe­cially its col­lab­or­at­ive devel­op­ment mode. They are also invest­ing massively in it, fol­low­ing the example of Microsoft, which in 2018 bought Git­Hub, the very pop­u­lar plat­form for host­ing and man­aging free soft­ware development.

Unpaid con­tri­bu­tions? The ques­tion of paid work

Even today, there is a tend­ency to asso­ci­ate free soft­ware with the image of volun­teer developers and a hack­er eth­ic based on free­dom, hedon­ism and self-ful­fil­ment, albeit with indi­vidu­al bene­fits in terms of recog­ni­tion in the labour market.

The real­ity is dif­fer­ent, how­ever, as today, for example, only about 15% of con­tri­bu­tions to Linux are made by volun­teers³. A closer look at the con­tri­bu­tions pos­ted on a plat­form such as Git­Hub reveals that a major­ity of them are pos­ted via a pro­fes­sion­al address⁴.

It seems, then, that a land­scape is emer­ging around open source soft­ware in which volun­teer work and organ­isa­tions coex­ist with paid work and com­mer­cial enterprises.

Who are the con­trib­ut­ing companies?

That com­pan­ies con­trib­ute to open source soft­ware that they use on a daily basis might seem logic­al, espe­cially in a con­text where the free rider phe­nomen­on of using without con­trib­ut­ing has often been denounced. How­ever, when we take a closer look at the com­pan­ies whose employ­ees con­trib­ute the most to the devel­op­ment of the most act­ive, highest rated and/or most con­trib­uted pro­jects, no com­pany oper­at­ing in a non-com­puter sec­tor ranks in the top 20 con­trib­ut­ors. In fact, although some com­pan­ies are start­ing to imple­ment open source evan­gel­ism pro­grammes, they con­trib­ute very little to pro­jects, usu­ally due to cul­tur­al and mana­geri­al res­ist­ance linked to a fear of los­ing con­trol of intel­lec­tu­al prop­erty rights.

In fact, it is among the IT giants (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, Face­book, Hua­wei, Oracle and Sam­sung) that we find the biggest con­trib­ut­ors to these open source projects.

From mas­ter­ing digit­al infra­struc­ture to mas­ter­ing data

Today, the entire digit­al infra­struc­ture of the Inter­net is based on open source soft­ware (such as Linux, Kuber­netes, and more gen­er­ally the entire soft­ware stack on which com­mer­cial clouds are built), and thus the Inter­net ser­vice plat­forms inten­ded for busi­nesses or the gen­er­al pub­lic, such as search engines or social net­works. These plat­forms allow the IT giants that have developed them to col­lect, pro­cess and value the quant­it­ies of data that are at the heart of their busi­ness models.

It is there­fore under­stand­able that these IT giants may have an interest in get­ting involved in the devel­op­ment of digit­al infra­struc­ture, in order to define its ori­ent­a­tions and char­ac­ter­ist­ics to best serve their activ­it­ies⁵. The aim is to agree on open tech­nic­al stand­ards in order to min­im­ise risks or to pool devel­op­ment costs. But it is also a ques­tion of mak­ing open source tech­no­lo­gies com­pat­ible with the expect­a­tions of their cli­ent com­pan­ies, which requires a cul­tur­al change with­in the pro­jects, in order to move towards a form of pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion⁶.

By con­trolling the digit­al infra­struc­ture, dom­in­a­tion of the data mar­ket by web giants is rein­forced, with all the con­sequences this may have for com­pan­ies and indi­vidu­al users in terms of inde­pend­ence and privacy.

What future for FLOSS?

Where­as free soft­ware had imposed itself as a safe­guard against the dom­in­a­tion of IT by a hand­ful of play­ers, which it cri­ti­cised, it is now being incor­por­ated by web giants. Des­pite speeches high­light­ing their mem­ber­ship of a « free soft­ware com­munity » presen­ted as uni­form, these com­pan­ies retain its col­lab­or­at­ive devel­op­ment mode but place its prin­ciples and val­ues of shar­ing, inde­pend­ence and free­dom in second place. This can be seen in the ignor­ance of the prin­ciples of open source licences, such as « Inner Source« ⁸ or that of the use of CLAs (Con­trib­ut­or License Agree­ments), which allow the licence gov­ern­ing a soft­ware product to be changed.

How­ever, many free soft­ware act­ors are still attached to these found­ing prin­ciples and mil­it­ate for their respect, which is neces­sary to guar­an­tee the dur­ab­il­ity of the free eco­sys­tem, which is cur­rently being called into ques­tion by the dom­in­a­tion of IT giants. This means pro­mot­ing a diversity of altern­at­ive decent­ral­ised and inter­op­er­able plat­forms and ser­vices, such as the « archipel­it­isa­tion » pro­posed by the Framasoft asso­ci­ation, the Mat­rix open stand­ard for secure and decent­ral­ised real-time com­mu­nic­a­tion, or NextCloud, a file host­ing and col­lab­or­a­tion solu­tion with an open architecture.

But bey­ond these ini­ti­at­ives, the ques­tion arises as to the role of the State in reg­u­lat­ing and fin­an­cing altern­at­ive plat­forms that pre­serve data sov­er­eignty and pro­tect pri­vacy. Indeed, aren’t open source pro­jects based on volun­teer com­munit­ies the pot of gold in the face of the iron pot of the IT giants, which have almost unlim­ited resources to pay the developers of their own open source platforms?