Professional Strategies for Handling Risks in Open Modes of Software Development

Abstract

Software companies today align with communities of volunteering programmers whom develop open source software on the internet as a common good. Networks of open source developers then become resources empowering professional programmers and their capacity to innovate at work. In this text we investigate how this change demand that professional programmers also govern their own way of handling risks concerning e.g. patent-, security- or reliability problems. The text contributes to a broader understanding of how open modes of production affect the way contemporary knowledge workers handle uncertainties at work. In the analysis, a concept of self-governance informed by sociological elaborations on social control as well as organizational sociology, enable an analysis of the interplay between organizational arrangements and societal discourses on openness and innovation. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 programmers in two types of companies: one at proprietary-oriented software firms that have incorporated open source software, which we call hybrid companies, and the other group at so-called pure-play SME: s that is formed around a business model based on open source. The result show how a reliable mode of open source software development is perceived differently in hybrid and pure-play firms, and how organizational conditions affect programmers’ strategies for controlling their own mode of developing software.