Shift to the Competences Model: A Social Network Analysis of Open Source Professional Developers.

In recent years free software has transformed the economic model of a part of the software industry, which previously relied almost exclusively on intellectual property and sale of software licenses. The introduction of open source software in the centre of the strategies of IT giants such as IBM and Sun seems to challenge this model. In this new model the software which code, is becoming freely accessible to everyone and it becomes the property of anyone. IBM illustrates this changeover to the intangible field when the company waived its activity to the most visible and palpable production, the production of hardware, and which has in the same period invested millions of dollars in free software. Companies such as Red Hat have totally dedicated their activity around these software and employ thousands of workers. We make the assumption that the professional developers of free software are the main actors of this change, and that the accurate observation of their professional trajectory teach us a lot about their mobility and the transformation of the information technology sector in general.1 The emergence of professional developers of free software