What Open Source Can Learn from Microsoft

In case you hadn't noticed, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle over a posting that a Firefox 2.0 alpha had been released. However, this rumour has been definitively scotched by one of the top Firefox people on his blog, so you can all relax now (well, for a couple of days, at least, until the real alpha turns up).

And who cares whether the code out there is an alpha, or a pre-alpha or even a pre-pre-alpha? Well, never mind who cares, there's another point that everyone seems to be missing: that this flurry of discoveries, announcements, commentaries, denials and more commentaries is just what Firefox needs as it starts to become respectable and, well, you know, slightly dull.

In fact, the whole episode should remind people of a certain other faux-leak about a rather ho-hum product that took place fairly recently. I'm referring to the Origami incident a couple of weeks ago, which produced an even bigger spike in the blogosphere.

It's the same, but different, because the first happened by accident in a kind of embarrassed way, while the latter was surely concocted by sharp marketing people within Microsoft. So, how about if the open source world started to follow suit by "leaking" the odd bit of code to selected bloggers who can be relied upon to get terribly agitated and to spread the word widely?

At first sight, this seems to be anathema to a culture based on openness, but there is no real contradiction. It is not a matter of hiding anything, merely making the manner of its appearance more tantalising - titillating, even. The people still get their software, the developers still get their feedback. It's just that everyone has super fun getting excited about nothing - and free software's market share inches up another notch.