Political stances and cognition: proprietary versus open-source ideologies in software development

Political culture and understandings of democracy Generally, analyses of political disputes involve the consideration of explicit and conceptual discourses voiced by different interested stakeholders. In order to deepen such analyses and take into consideration some neglected (and probably unexpected) aspects of political life, it is worth combining sociological interpretation with insights from cognitive linguistics. This theoretical endeavour is carried out in this paper, which focuses on software development for neuroimaging studies and claims that political disagreements frequently take the form of a clash between metaphoric and metonymic reasoning. Neuroimaging is the study of the brain via images. Since the late 1990s, a broad range of software packages have been developed for analysing brain data and producing brain images. Even though most of these packages have been released as open-source products, there are also some successful packages developed as close, proprietary products. The ideological clashes between proprietary and open-source software are well-known and have been studied in detail. Here it is claimed, however, that in addition to analysing such conceptual disagreements, it is worth understanding how these discourses are structured in terms of constitutive concepts and linguistic strategies. The ideology of open-source software draws on a metaphor (SOFTWARE IS A MACHINE) that depicts software development as a technical activity that requires institutional organization, scientific knowledge, and access to financial resources. As a consequence, large corporations would be endowed with the most appropriate means to engineer efficient software. In their turn, members of open-source communities rely on a metonymic understanding (the PRODUCT FOR PROCESS metonymy) framing software as the outcome of a development process that can be more or less collaborative. In this metonymic approach, politically sound development processes are those which open up more space for open, collaborative, and democratic relations between software developers. In line with the proposal of cognitive linguistics, it is assumed here that metaphors and metonymies are not simply resources used by artists; they are rather common cognitive strategies that inform various sorts of human understanding, including political stances. Moreover, it is claimed that by considering the relevance of (unconscious) linguistics practices, it is possible to refine analyses of political life. In this way, one can, for example, analyse how some companies have been able to strengthen their discourse by combining (metaphoric) technical arguments with claims pointing to (metonymic) social concerns around software development. The politics of metaphors and metonymies is not manifested only in the domain of software. Metaphors require an abstract reasoning that is in line with the comparisons and estrangements promoted by typical capitalist relations and schemes. In their turn, metonymic reasoning requires consideration of concrete relations, which constitutes a cognitive tool frequently mobilized by minority or resistance movements willing to enlarge the scope of democracy.