This document is the compendium for the course INF 5780: Open source, open collaboration and innovation at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, written for the autumn semester of 2012. This multi-disciplinary compendium presents aspects of commons-based peer production, free and open source software, open licenses, open standards, and how to extract value from these phenomena in open innovation and business models.

This document is the compendium for the course INF 5780: Open source, open collaboration and innovation at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, written for the autumn semester of 2013. This multi-disciplinary compendium presents aspects of commons-based peer production, free and open source software, open licenses, open standards, and how to extract value from these phenomena in open innovation and business models.

Question how to balance moral and economic rights of creators with the interests and needs of public always was a “stumbling block” in sphere of intellectual property regimes. This issue can be viewed from different perspectives: Firstly, it covers ongoing discussion about human rights approach to intellectual property, which touches on questions like intellectual property and health issues, intellectual property and access to culture, intellectual property and access to knowledge. Last one will be described below latter. Secondly, it is obviously concerns never-ending debates in world of WWW between copyright holders and internet users. This aspect deeply described by Lawrence Lessig in his famous book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity when he analyzed the tension that exists between the concepts of piracy and property in the intellectual property realm in the context of what he calls the present "depressingly compromised process of making law" and noting that last one has been captured in most nations by giant corporations that mainly having their interest in the accumulation of capital and not at all the free exchange of ideas. In other words, when it comes to Internet, it could be said that copyright unjustifiably “stifles” ability of public (namely, users) to make the most of the new environment, and, moreover, impinges upon public domain. Moreover, users’ rights are sometimes treated as limits on or exceptions to the rights of copyright holders. For example that well-know notion that a copyright user is not allowed to copy the way an author or artist expresses an idea but is free to use the idea that inspired the expression. Moreover, copyright regime allows users to use a copyright work before the copyright term will be expired. These cases can be found in the Berne Convention and in domestic copyright legislation (recognised by Convention) . However, critics stand that the amount of real “freedom” equal to potential user interests is questionable.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the quantity and quality of studies dedicated to the economics of research and development for science and technology, 2 with particular interest paid to the economic study of the impact of intellectual property rights in the fostering of innovation.

Summary. The methodical adoption of F/OSS in SMEs raises critical problems related to issues such as technology, organization, culture and business model choices. In this paper, we describe Polaris4OS, a successful experience of F/OSS adoption among CEOs, managers and developers of ICT companies. The lack of F/OSS culture has been identified as the most critical obstacle for the exploitation of the new opportunities offered by the F/OSS communities.