The Rules of Open Source Marketing

Over on LWN.net I've an article grandly entitled "The birth of the open source enterprise stack", which has generated a fair amount of comment on the site. At the end, I write:

a subsequent feature will explore the surprising richness of the upper layers of the emerging open source enterprise stack, in areas such as systems management, customer relationship management, business intelligence, enterprise content management, enterprise resource planning and communications.

One of the companies I shall be discussing in the context of enterprise content management is Alfresco, so I was intrigued to come across an extensive think-piece by that company's marketing director, Ian Howells.

It, too, has a rather grandiose title: "10 Rules of Open Source Marketing". It draws heavily on Geoffrey Moore's ideas, but contains some interesting insights of its own. The one that I particularly liked was the following:

Rule 9: Your Software Infrastructure is Key
Dell transformed the PC industry not by selling cheap PCs but transforming the whole value chain and supply chain for PC production. From an operational perspective Open Source isn't about cheap software but about transforming the whole value chain for software across development, testing, translation, product management, marketing, sales and support.

The number of people downloading your software, asking questions, accessing your Web site, accessing demonstrations, trialing the product, discussing in forums, updating the wiki ... is massive compared to a traditional software start-up company. The extended infrastructure has to be able to support contributions, bug reports, and fixes from other individuals/companies, take feedback from forums and surveys, and be able to support hundreds of thousands people downloading your software. In amongst this, you have to be able to identify those who want to buy support, patches, and updates for a mission-critical environment and those who want to use the open source as part of the community. Open Source companies have to be masters of the whole Open Source software value chain to support the massive growth potential.

I really think this idea is the key to why open source will ultimately prevail: it represents a thorough-going re-invention of the entire process of creating, distributing and supporting code. Responses by traditional software companies are necessarily partial - unless they convert to open source themselves - and so by definition insufficient.