Paid and Unpaid Work in Peer Production

Typology

From Stefan Merten [1]:

Paid time

"What people confuses mostly is that there are Free Software developers which are paid by their companies for their development efforts. Or to be more exact: That they work for Free Software during their paid time. However, that people do something during their paid time does not say everything about the relation of their employers to what they do - think of coffee breaks for an example.

I think there are a number of types of Free Software development during paid time which needs to be distinguished:

• Non-official work: That is when people work on Free Software on their spare time without knowledge of the management. This can be the case when you use a certain Free tool during your job and improve it as a side effect to your normal work and give the improvements back to the community. This also applies to Free tools developed during a job.

• Half-official work: There may be times when people are not working on a job project because there is no order at the moment. In these times management may give people the opportunity to work at their own projects which may be Free Software. Google even has an official 20% share of such time.

• Non-competetive work: If you work in the software sector then you know that often there are tools you use but which are not of competetive interest to your customer. For instance in a big company you may develop a Wiki engine for the Intranet but the core business of the company is in a totally different sector - such as finances for instance. In that case the management may allow that in-house development be public Free Software.

• Competitive work: This is the case when a company officially engages in a Free Software project because it has manifest interests in this project. For instance if a processor vendor engages in the Linux kernel to make it run on his processors. Then the employees not only officially work for the company in the Free Software project but also this is relevant to competition.

Only in the last case I see the danger of alienated influences from paid labor. And even then it should be distinguished whether these influences are more useful or more harmful for the community.

Non-paid time

If develop Free Software during non-paid time then it seems to be clear that this must be based on Selbstentfaltung. However, there might be cases where people during their non-paid time they do things in the interest of commercial interests - be it in their own interest or in the interest of their company." (http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/MeasuringCommercialInfluences)