Beyond severance: The entangled economies of free software, open source and the high-tech industry

This article examines the enduring consequences of what I call “severance” in analyses of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): the assumption that positions it as a separate world, antithetic to corporate production. Even after a decade of corporate investment and strategic integration, severance still underlies much research and influences how we observe and theorize FOSS. To move forward, I propose the perspective of entangled economies , which studies FOSS as an industrial public good, tied to the software industry and sustained through heterogeneous forms of labor. I substantiate this framework through a case study of Git, a central infrastructure of contemporary software production through which nearly every line of code circulates. Drawing on three years of ethnography and computational analysis, I present evidence of entanglement at multiple levels, showing that ties to industry are not confined to salaried contributors but also run through volunteer work. Each form of entanglement is woven from heterogeneous logics, including value capture and corporate control, but also care for infrastructures and engagement in what contributors call real work. This study develops an analytical lens for tracing how contemporary digital production takes shape through entangled relations of labor, valuation, and infrastructures.