The Disruptive Time of the Gift: (Radical) Imagination at Work in Free and Open Source Software
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I explore the notion of making time for a radical imagination; in particular, I consider the gift culture of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in terms of poststructuralist understandings of gifting, which posit the gift as a form of deferral, a structure of uncertainty, and the temporal basis of subjectivity. Critics who reduce FOSS to either a utopian discourse or the neoliberal property regime negate the temporal dislocation from capitalist regimentation and the imaginative opportunities made possible by FOSS. The technosocial discontinuity enabled by FOSS software development is a form of kairos, or opportune moment, for radical imagining. This article traces the concept of the gift from Mauss and Batailles to poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Bourdieu. It crosses their theories with analyses of the FOSS phenomenon, to show the limitations of popular technolibertarian readings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".