The origins of open source software are still a puzzle in many ways, even if people all around the world use it every day or have studied FLOSS (free libre open source software)--they rarely know its origins or technological history. Lorenzo Benussi will try to fill this gap by analyzing the open source history from the origins of its technological paradigm to present day.

In analyzing the long-term technological history of free open source software, the main research questions are:

• Is the phenomenon completely new?
• And if it is not totally new, where does it come from?
• How has open source software developed over time?

As a consequence, this talk will focus primarily on the analysis of the free open source software history of technological change over a period of almost sixty years. Benussi adopted a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the network of relations emerging between inventions and technological innovations, as well as economic determinants and intellectual property rights regimes throughout the period. Thus, investigating the origins of the phenomenon as a way of understanding its evolution.