[JPEG Seminar] Session of 15 March 2024 - Open Source contributors, "court painters"? Investigating the continuities of free and paid work in the production of free software - 10am - room 1W48

 Gabriel Alcaras*

for a seminar session entitled

This presentation examines the place of free labour in the IT industry. Based on an investigation into the production of Git, a software package central to our contemporary digital infrastructures, the author analyses the relationship between the main paid activity - the 'day job' - and voluntary contributions made outside working hours - the 'after hours'. He sheds light on three dimensions of the relationship between free and paid work. Firstly, it quantifies its historical development and explains how paid work has both become the rule in software while remaining the exception among contributors. Secondly, it shows that free work is often carried out in the continuity of paid work, including from the point of view of the temporality of the activity. Thirdly, it questions the absence of working conditions in the digital traces of computer activity and highlights a process of erasure in the service of a vision that contrasts free and paid work.

The meeting will take place on Friday 15 March 2024 at 10.00 a.m. in room 1W48

*Gabriel Alcaras has a doctorate in sociology and is currently an assistant professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel and attached to the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS).

His research focuses on the production of digital infrastructures, at the crossroads of the sociology of IT work, the anthropology of capitalism and the study of science and technology.

His thesis, defended in November 2022From free software to code control.

L'industrialisation de l'écriture informatique" is devoted to Git, a hegemonic development infrastructure for the collective production of code.

He won the Young Author Prize awarded by the journal *Sociologie du travail*, for his article published in 2020 entitled "Des biens industriels publics. Genesis of the insertion of free software in Silicon Valley".
(First Prize Ex-Æquo).