What is Users/Consumers

This chapter will focus on the economic and temporal/labor demands of creating free/libre and open source software (FLOSS). It begins by analyzing the economic and educational foundations of those countries most actively involved in FLOSS development, and how that affects the overall demographics of the FLOSS movement. Through examining the symbiotic relationship that the community has with commercial or closed software development, the educational and employment prerequisites, and overwhelming gendered makeup of the movement, we will come to see the movement in new ways. This is supplemented by an examination of how this economic structure could conceivably be exploited for increased economic gain at the expense of those individuals actually involved in the creation of the software. Finally, the chapter concludes by looking at possible ways in which FLOSS software could be opened up more broadly to non-technical software users.