Online innovation and collaboration in the creation of free software

ABSTRACT Advances in information technologies have led to user-centered innovation of artifacts from cyber culture. This advent of capitalism causes the emergence of approaches that contemplate collective and immaterial production in force in open source software communities. From a post-structuralist perspective, 6 interviews, 2 videos and an online discussion list were analyzed to appreciate the process of building the hegemonic discourse from the logic of equivalence, difference and fantasy. It was found that the speeches of the developers symbolize a presence yet to come, with the particular demands diluted in an equivalence chain that encompasses the largest number of claims, and that there is an effort to create an incessant process of generating value by overcoming the community frontiers, continuously articulating stakeholders to access resources and generate joint solutions in the innovation process.