Peer production ed openness: aspetti istituzionali, profili giuridici ed implicazioni strategiche

This dissertation analyzes the Free/Libre and Open Source Software phenomenon as a new model of innovation creation within the Open Innovation paradigm, summarizing the economic literature written in the last ten years. It is divided in five chapters. The first concerns the FLOSS historical evolution which, according to Benussi (2006), shows how this movement, which history has been influenced by relevant technological innovations, has its origin in the open knowledge model, typical of science. The second chapter describes the different means of intellectual property rights used for software in Italy, Europe and the U.S.A., compared to the several Open Source Licenses, and it shows how diminishing the classical forms of software protection, I mean copyright and patents, through this licenses, can enhance software improvement. The third chapter is about FLOSS as a kind of consumer resistance: using the Consumer Culture Theory perspective, this phenomenon is seen as a creative form of consumer resistance, where consumers’ increasing agency blurs the boundaries between the world of production and that one of consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the FLOSS as a private model of public goods production, and it also summarizes the literature on developers’ motivations. The last chapter describes the business models used by firms to exploit FLOSS, according to the Open Innovation paradigm, underlying the managerial problems concerning firms’ collaboration with FLOSS communities.