The immateriality of both commodities and labor, which is increasingly characteristic of contemporary capitalism at its hi-tech centers, has complicated drawing a hard distinction between productive and unproductive forms of labor. Drawing an overly technical distinction between these two categories of labor potentially overlooks some important aspects of the processes of capitalist reproduction, particularly the increasingly social character of labor, and as such, a broader definition must be considered. The labor engaged in the production of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is illustrative of this need for further examination of the productive-unproductive distinction, for the fact that though FOSS, in some respects, appears tendentially anti-capitalist, in fact, it, and the immaterial labor driving it, has essentially been fully subsumed in the apparatus of capital accumulation.
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