A limited revolution — The distributional consequences of Open Source Software in North America

Open Source Software (OSS) has become an important alternative method of organizing the production of software and has gained in popularity and use because of its benefits and costs relative to the dominant proprietary software model. In this paper, I use evidence from the United States and Canada to examine the distribution of these benefits and costs. I argue that although the rhetoric surrounding OSS is supported empirically, the benefits of OSS have been limited because of the way this technological project has evolved within its associated policy environment. That is, although ostensibly neutral, the policies and laws of both the U.S. and Canadian governments have tended to be positioned implicitly against the use of OSS both in the public sector and in the economy generally. In addition, OSS use and development requires a set of skills that are absent in many instances or create prohibitively high costs. Thus OSS is typically used by larger organizations, and its development is restricted to a mostly male, highly educated, high-income group of contributors. Therefore while the benefits of OSS are real, the distribution of these benefits is skewed.