CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Irzik, Emrah |
|---|---|
| Title | Free software as commons Between informational capitalism and a new mode of production |
| Summary | Free Software is a particular way of organizing the production and distribution of software that offers a solid alternative to the intellectual property regime by constituting an open commons: non-proprietary, created and held in common by all. Considering that in contemporary capitalism a significant amount of wealth is created through the application of intellectual effort to existing knowledge to produce new, higher compositions of knowledge that can be privately monetized as intellectual property, the challenge that Free Software might present to capitalism is bound to have important transformational potential. This potential needs to be studied both on an empirical level, in its partial and concrete manifestations in actual projects, and investigated more theoretically, to see if Free Software can be characterized as a nascent, new mode of production. This dissertation aims to contribute to the theorization of the relation between Free Software as a commons and the tenets of informational capitalism by means of an analytical study that is supported by an ethnography of a particular instance of Free Software as a project and a community. In the theoretical part, I analyze in what ways and to what extent Free Software is incorporated into and comes into conflict with informational capitalism. I consider the contributions as well as the limitations of the liberal progressive and classical revolutionary perspectives on Free Software, pointing out the necessity of seeking to explain it as a revolutionary mode of production on its own terms, as the 'transcendent synthesists' do. I then move on to contribute to such an explanation by analyzing three major aspects of Free Software with a claim to capture what is idiosyncratic in it as a mode of production: the forms of remuneration for labor, the emerging class position of the producers, and a specific, radical form of decision making within the sphere of production. My empirical analysis consists of an ethnographic study of the Free Software community in Turkey with a focus on the Pardus project, the largest experiment with Free Software production undertaken yet in Turkey, under the aegis of the Scientific and Technological Research Council. It seeks to exemplify and complicate my theoretical characterizations by focusing on the community of various actors such as volunteers, employees, users, and academics within and around the project. By means of extended interviews with Pardus programmers, the observation of public conventions, online ethnography of convention archives, social media sites, blogs, and related company or university web pages, I explore how the development of the project is influenced by institutional and cultural-political concerns, the different motivations and perceptions of individuals participating in it, and the social movement aspect of the Free Software community. The Pardus project's bell-shaped historical trajectory of success and its entanglement in Turkish politics reveal important insights into the uneasy relationship of Free Software with capitalism on both micro and nation-state scales. |
| Supervisor | Rigi, Jakob |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/irzik_emrah.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University