How free software developers work

This configuration leads to questions on the characteristics of the collective action that enables the transition from individual voluntary commitments that are potentially volatile and unstable to the completion of a collective production that involves continuity and sustainability. The production of free software cannot be considered the contingent result of a spontaneous convergence of individual, independent commitments. It presupposes certain forms of motivation for the participants to work, who are in turn capable of ensuring a certain continuity in their commitments and of coordinating the organization of their contributions. Because even if a software program is a text, it is an “active” text that works insofar as it is made up of a list of instructions that are automatically executed by a machine, which requires an extremely strong coherency of the different parts of the text (Horn, 2004).