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?