Information Society Watch

January 2007, Charles M. Schweik & Robert English, First Monday

This paper formally describes the concept of Free/Libre and Open Source Software projects (FOSS) institutions and conducts a preliminary examination of FOSS projects in order to shed light into institutions, their composition and importance to the projects. FOSS are a form of Internet-based commons, and an important distinction between natural resource commons and FOSS commons is that the “tragedy” to be avoided in natural resources is over-harvesting and the potential destruction of the resource. In FOSS commons the “tragedy” to be avoided is project abandonment and a “dead” project. Institutions – defined as informal norms, more formalised rules, and governance structures – are mechanisms that have been shown to help overcome tragedies in some environmental commons situations. The authors report findings from an initial set of interviews of FOSS developers and find that in commons settings that need to encourage contribution rather than control over-appropriation, the institutional designs appear to be extremely lean and as unobtrusive as possible. To the FOSS programmers the authors interviewed, institutional structure adds transaction costs and hinders collective action. This is markedly different from traditional environmental commons settings (Adapted from authors).

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