Subsist! FLOSS production and the labour viewpoint

This panel aims at starting a discussion on Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) from the point of view of labour. While some universities and private R&D labs of companies support FLOSS, a lot of work on code is carried out by individuals and groups of developers
outside the traditional institutions of society and without getting paid. The FLOSS modality of the organisation of production contained in Yochai Benkler's term "commons based peer production" has shown to be superior to the way proprietary software production is organised. What this term does not address, however, is the social position of labour vis-a-vis the current regime of accumulation of capital. As Tiziana Terranova recognised by the end of the 1990s, the 'free labour' of coder communities gets easily appropriated by capitalism without compensation. Companies such as Google and Apple build their empires on the basis of FLOSS. Open code has become the engine of innovation in the age of Web 2.0., an industry focussed on turning "affective labour" into money, while the developers themselves often live on financial subsistence level. Yet partly FLOSS coders have themselves to blame. Their anarcho-libertarian ideals lead them to avoid organising themselves on any political level which would go beyond defending the "free flow" of information. Furthermore, the myth of the male hacker who singlemindedly sets out to become the explorer of the frontier of encoded knolwedge creates specific mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The rate of participation of women in FLOSS is much lower than in proprietary software production. This panel proposes to use concepts developed by leftist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to analyse the position of
"free labour" in advanced informational capitalism. FLOSS coders experience the 'housewifisation of labour'*. This term means that the
work of women is taken for granted and not considered 'production', so it goes unpaid. In the course of neoliberal globalisation, male wage workers increasingly become subjected to the housewifisation of labour too. FLOSS coders appear to be speerheading this development, albeit voluntarily. Therefore we ask, how can FLOSS coders develop a political subjectivity which does not inherently support capitalism? Which modes of organisation can be deployed to end (self)exploitation and gain political momentum, workers rights, fair pay and reasonable working conditions?

* On this term "housewifisation" see: Mies, Maria, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof. 1988. Women: the last colony. London: Zed Books.