Sociology seminar – Thursdays

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm 
Date: 3rd April 2024
Place: room 2007

Gabriel Alcaras (University Gustave Eiffel) – After Hours: The Role and Evolution of Open Source Work in Software Engineering

Abstract :

The high-tech industry is the world’s most profitable industry. It also relies on vast amounts of unpaid labor and depends on technical infrastructures developed independently of tech companies. As Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) gains influence in every critical aspect of the software industry, prominent actors (such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook) have become increasingly and openly involved in FOSS. This recent shift has theoretical implications. It questions the assumption by previous research that FOSS is an autonomous social world. Instead, we argue that FOSS is deeply embedded in the tech industry’s coding practices and professional ecologies, drawing on a case study of one of the most widely used programs in the software industry − Git. In addition to online and offline ethnographic fieldwork, we analyze 400,000 emails and 60,000 code contributions to understand how open source work relates to developers’ main jobs. We find three main results which support the thesis of embeddedness. First, we show that unpaid labor is the norm among contributors but that paid labor produces most of the code. Second, unpaid long-term contributors often pursue the “rational dream” of becoming paid contributors, sometimes successfully. Third, interviews and work schedules indicate that unpaid labor often happens as a part of engineers’ day jobs.

Organizers: Annina Cleasson, Paola Tubaro, Patrick Präg (CREST Sociology unit)

Sponsors: CREST