 LE "CHAUDRON MAGIQUE" ET "L'INVENTION COLLECTIVE"Post-Print from HAL Abstract: This paper deals with free software and open source development projects, ie with the emergence of a form of noncommercial production of the software. Without payment nor important financial investment, without planification nor prior design, complex products as Linux or Apache could be born. All occurs as if they emerged from a kind of « magic cauldron » (Raymond, 1999). We try to understand and to clear up the mysteries of this « cauldron ». The production engineering constraints and the cycle of development and life of software are studied in the light of existing institutional framework (the copyright or open sources licences like GPL). The structures of organization and coordination of the open source projects rest then on the modularity, the emergence of division of labour, and a selective and hierarchical control of the various contributions. The evolution of this projects follows the general pattern of « collective invention » where the free sharing and use of the code allow production and incremental evolutions of the programs. Keywords: free software; collective invention; organizational coordination; logiciels libres; invention collective; coordination organisationnelle; open source (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Économie appliquée : archives de l'Institut de science économique appliquée, 2005, tome LVIII, 2005, n°1, pp.59-83 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00129395 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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