Political Motives of Developers for Collaboration on GNU/Linux

This paper examines to what degree developers of the collaboratively produced computer operating system GNU/Linux are politically motivated for their contributions. It first states that software is politically relevant. It then goes on to argue for the political significance of Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) and discusses the developers ambivalent attitude towards a politicisation of FS/OSS. Centrepiece is a survey carried out with 85 GNU/Linux developers that showed that most of them are conscious of the social relevance of FS/OSS and that their engagement is of a deliberately political nature.