"Marchand" et "non-marchand" dans l'économie des logiciels

In some activities of production and exchange cohabit two areas, commercial and a not-commercial. Such is currently the case in the economy of the software. A great number of programs (Apache, Linux, Firefox, etc...) are indeed produced in open source, without apparent investment, without direct pay of the contributions, or any direct sale of the products - those usually being distributed free of charge. This free software is based on certain licences (licence GNU-GPL, BSD, MPL, etc.), which reorganize the law of the copyright so as to grant to the users of the program particularly wide rights of user on the source code, by voluntarily sacrificing the patrimonial right (fructus) of the creator of the code. Thus one saw emerging and being reinforced a true economy of the free software in opposition to the marketing strategies of the editors of proprietary software package. In parallel, a great number of programs were and have been for a long time provided free of charge, without being free software or open source software. One can then wonder about the question of the "value of the software" as a product - commercial value and practical value -, and also about the question of their "cost". A question which brings into play general technical determinants (software like code, "active text" and numerical file), but also the place of the code considered in the framework of the information processing system, the particular definition of intellectual property rights, the relation existing between producer and user of code, as well as the economic models involved. In this communication, we would like to analyze these two alternative forms of production and distribution of the same technical objects, commercial and not-commercial. After having analysed the question of the value of the software, and thus explained the "freeware" phenomenon or the setting in the public domain of some codes, one will seek to identify the principal causes - techniques, social, institutional - commercial cleavage "merchant/not-merchant" in the production and the distribution of the programs. From this point of view, one will be interested more particularly in the development of an economy of the free software, by distinguishing the stages in emergence and the reinforcement from this not-commercial sphere of the economy. One will start from the initial institutional innovation (licences) to recall the setting-up of the great open source projects starting from wide area networks by and for users/self-manufacturers. In a second stage, a system of distribution of the products (not-commercial or commercial) appeared. More recently, the simple cohabitation of the free software and the software under restrictive rights of property (copyright and patents) have been yielding to a more complex articulation, where one sees free software replacing commercial software, the disappearence of some former proprietary strategies, but also integration in the strategies of the large firms of the data processing industry of programs directly resulting from the open source movement