LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an opportunity for Open Source?
• More real-life case studies on how OSS is being used in mission-critical scenarios.
• A European or global perspective on Open Source in Public Administration.
• How to make use of Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine with Open Source apps?
• Technical tutorials for beginners, especially for building Web apps (e.g. PHP/Ruby/Java/etc. for beginners).
• High performance Web environments with Open Source tools
• Security in the Cloud
• What’s the status of some of the regional Linux distributions?

I can’t promise that your talk will be accepted if it covered one of the above topics. The review process is of course a joint effort of the whole Program Committee. Anyway, it’s definitely worth a try. Of course, any other topic I did not think of is also highly welcome.

Go here to submit your LinuxTag proposal.

For example, an Open Source business started in Spain will naturally feel more comfortable with doing sales in Spain with most employees speaking and thinking in Spanish. Spain is where our sample company comes from, it’s a safe haven, and it’s where the bulk of sales are being made. Why should they go global, invest in building an international business and take the risk?

Sooner or later, there will be global competition in the same niche from another Open Source vendor or project. Someone else will reach a critical mass of international community and business adoption much quicker than the Spanish company will ever be able within its country of origin. And then our sample vendor will find itself against a much stronger competitor who isn’t afraid to take risks.

Essentially, Open Source vendors must think of themselves as global and look at regions as regions, and not the other way round.

In order to do this well, English should be the main language of communication with the public right from the start. Make sure all general marketing collateral is first available in English. This will make English and an international point of view part of the company’s DNA from the beginning, which is critical for success.

Independently, it is of course important to note that in some regions you will only be able to attract early adopters by communicating in English. Pragmatist buyers in countries such as France or Germany will appreciate if your sales stuff spoke French or German and related marketing collateral were available in their native language. This trend of early adopters willing to try out English-only products while mainstream users wait for the product to mature, allows for easy and free market research. If the early adopters in a region start using and talking about your project and you were able to win a few prestigious customers, it is time to consider localizing there.

So, don’t make this mistake, thinking like a regional Open Source vendor that goes global. Rather think like an international company focusing its sales efforts towards certain regions.

Looking at this from another perspective, I never understood discussions whether MySQL (for example) is a European or US company? Trying to link banner Open Source vendors with national or regional pride is totally neglecting the fact that Open Source is and always has been a global business.

There are two different sets of questions, depending on your background:

• IT Executives of CMS Vendors
• IT Executives of CMS End User Companies

Thanks for participating in the survey and please spread the word!

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.

People seem to think they have a right to free software and free support. It is not about free speech. It’s all about free beer!

I don’t think this blanket judgment is true. There have always been freeriders in Open Source communities, but the overall benefits of an Open Source community to an Open Source business always outweigh the community loss imposed by freeriders.

Here are the top commercial reasons why Open Source software vendors should invest in community development:

1. Better sales lead generation: A growing Open Source community translates into a growing sales pipeline if done well, i.e. OSS vendors can monetize a part of the community user base and convert them to commercial users.
2. More effective sales: Community-driven sales requires less effort compared to a direct sales approach, because potential buyers have already evaluated the Open Source product and contact sales only when they are ready for a purchase.
3. Raise visibility: A vibrant Open Source community fosters branding and word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Build a Brand Community: Open Source brands grow and thrive around real value created by a community of engaged, informed participants. A healthy community adds tremendous value to almost any activity a company engages in.
5. Larger install base: The goal is to build the corporate brand as well as product and service quality by creating a larger install base.
6. Cost-effective marketing: The larger and the more active an Open Source community, the more it helps to spread the word and the less investment in marketing is needed to achieve the same level of visibility.
7. Higher credibility: A growing Open Source community helps companies to be perceived as a true Open Source vendor by journalists, analysts and potential customers. A critical mass of community members also indicates how well a product solves a problem and that there is actual demand.
8. Cost-efficient and competitive business: Commercial Open Source offers the best cost-benefit ratio for enterprise customers due to cost savings, innovation and investment protection enabled by a vivid Open Source ecosystem that contributes bug fixes, new features and more.
9. Investment protection: Reduce client risk by broadening the base of product-related skills.
10. Test and develop new markets: Open Source offers companies and organizations a highly cost-effective route into international markets. Through community development tactics, OSS vendors can test and develop new markets and communities with little upfront investment.
11. Externalize 1st Level Support: Enable community to help themselves share information, to reduce support burden for the OSS vendor on basic issues.
12. Technology and thought leadership: Community development will help to establish an OSS product as a technology leader in the space by attracting external developers. Based on that, OSS vendors can through appropriate communications also become a thought leader.

As you might expect, let me take a look at it from the marketing perspective.

What I see in markets where plenty of open source offerings exist with a multitude of business models (e.g. in the CMS space), is that there is growing pressure on vendor-driven models to adopt more of the benefits of the community-driven model and vice versa.

There are various business tools that allow OSS vendors and their investors to test how much they will actually benefit from gradually moving control to the community. Switching to a more permissive license might be the last step.

For example, OSS vendors can increasingly include community members in discussing and executing the marketing strategy. Furthermore, a vendor could initialize a community board where the vendor discusses release cycles and development issues with community members. Both efforts could later lead towards a community-owned association that holds the trademark and decides upon the development roadmap.

On the other hand, community-driven OSS projects sometimes envy OSS vendors, especially when it comes to the ability of rolling out a focused marketing. I’ve heard from a hand full of board members of OSS associations that they’d love to a) actually have a marketing budget and b) have control over that budget without the need for lengthy discussions to reach consensus among the community. Things might perhaps be moving towards some light vendor-style structures here, given that OSS projects need to increasingly compete with OSS vendors. In the end, it’s all about OSS projects becoming more professional.

Wazi just published an article I wrote, comparing Europe and the US, which hopefully allows Open Source vendors based in the US to better understand the European market.

The article is based on the research I did for the talk I presented at this year’s OSBC. The part I personally find most interesting is:

It’s worth noting here the German study revealed that saving on licensing costs is more important to those adopting open source software for the first time. The longer someone uses FOSS, the more important the “freedom” aspects become — namely open standards, vendor independence, and the free and open source software philosophy. Hence, open source vendors need to approach potential customers in Europe differently depending on how open source savvy these potentials are.

That same study actually revealed a high level of satisfaction of users of Free and Open Source Software.

I’d like to thank the InitMarketing team for their valuable input while researching the topic and writing the article!

Now, enjoy reading my article over at Wazi: A Primer on Europe for US-Based Open Source Communities and Vendors

The question is: How about internal converting? How about the day, when in-house developers need to justify the use of FOSS to their managers when they seek to consolidate the corporate IT infrastructure? Will FOSS speak for itself?

That’s the day, when enthusiastic in-house developers should start to act and regard themselves as internal Open Source evangelists. They will attempt to build support for FOSS within their organization to establish it as part of the IT landscape. What can they do in favor of FOSS and what should FOSS vendors and projects do to support them?

As much as it is important in the public to achieve a critical mass of FOSS supporters, it is critical within organizations to convince the critical minds, i.e. the decision makers. Here are some points how internal evangelists should be supported:

1. Internal Open Source evangelists might face the problem of being “the prophets in their own land”. They need to be supported in any possible way by external “objective” sources. For example, through publicly available marketing and sales material highlighting the business benefits of a certain FOSS product. Furthermore, FOSS vendors could have sales staff visit on site and talk to management directly. In general, it is highly important that there is enough easily accessible marketing material provided by FOSS vendors and projects that allow internal evangelists to pick or develop good arguments. A common mistake, especially by FOSS vendors is to hide valuable information, asuming that it will make potential clients call them, while it actually hurts the back door go-to-market strategy.
2. The still growing momentum and usually positive media coverage helps internal evangelists to advocate FOSS within their organization by refering to success stories.
3. The best argument in favor of FOSS is a working implementation. Given the easy availability and access to FOSS source code, in-house developers can quickly set up a proof-of-concept or even specific simple solutions for internal use.

In general, FOSS might benefit from general organizational changes going on in today’s companies that reward inidividual and bottom-up initiatives. Flat hierarchies are supposed to avoid the problem that the person actually purchasing software is not the person actually using it. Technical staff that enjoys building IT solutions with Free and Open Source software that actually works as advertised will not be frustrated by software purchased due to mesmerizing sales presentations.

FOSS as a movement can actually support companies in becoming more efficient and effective, not only in terms of TCO, but also in terms of reduced staff turnover and more innovation, because it supports a more open and egalitarian corporate culture. Once these two phenomena converge, proprietary vendors will have a hard time matching such a corporate culture and yes, then we won’t have to believe in converting any longer.

I am looking forward to discussing aspects of internal FOSS evangelism at the German OSMB workshop on FOSS as part of an IT strategy taking place Thursday, Jan 29, 11-13:00 together with moderator Heinrich Seeger (Heise) and the other panelists Matthew Langham (Indiginox), Dr. Uwe Schmid (McKinsey), Kristian Raue (Jedox).

Shirky’s talk made Matt Asay think about how filture failure applies to Open Source which again made me realize just how true Shirky’s call for a “mental shift” in organizations applies to companies switching from a proprietary to an Open Source business model.

Such companies face a cultural change related to what Shirky calls “the fight about information flows and access to it”. The reason being that “the Internet allows large systems that are freerider-tolerant” in contrast to the offline-world where “small groups defend theirselves against freeriders”. Proprietary companies is what I’d call a “small group” regarding their mentality, no matter how many employees they actually have. Proprietary software vendors constantly strive to defend themselves against freeriders e.g. with patents and non-permissive licenses. Their partner companies benefit from being a partner because they have better access to information provided by the proprietary ISV.

Now think of a proprietary company leaning towards a FOSS business model, opening up their code and consequently also their communications. This means a lot of change, because communicating about Open Source products is essentially about communicating on the Web, where – as Shirky pointed out – large systems can evolve that are freerider-tolerant. And of course every Open Source vendor wants to have a large community. So, suddenly the gates are open and information is supposed to flow much more freely between the former proprietary software vendor and its community, which just as well includes partner companies.

In such a situation, communication tactics of employees and partner companies will have to change dramatically to sustain a successful Open Source business environment.

I officially started my own business in February: InitMarketing, the open source marketing company. Ever since then, the InitMarketing customer base keeps growing. As of today, there are 15 paying customers including open source software vendors and associations, ranging from content management systems, e-shops to Linux distributions, from mega corporations to small start-ups. Some of them are in the FOSS business for several years, others recently started or even open sourced their formerly proprietary product. InitMarketing helped them with marketing strategy definition, community building, public relations, blog coaching, event management, creating product brochures, writing case studies and white papers and much more.

Revenues for 2008 clearly exceeded my expectations. We have been contracted for project-specific work as well as on a retainer basis. A good part of that money went to InitMarketing’s team members who have done an excellent job helping out with their special expertise on customer projects.

I am particularly proud of InitMarketing.tv, because it is first of all a lot of fun to record the video interviews about Open Source marketing. Second, the videos provide real value to those who watch them much in the spirit of Open Source communites where expertise is being shared happily. Furthermore, video recording and editing has turned into a passion and I very much enjoy extending my prosumer skills.

The goals for InitMarketing in 2009 are to double our revenues, but given the world-wide economic downturn, I am clueless if we can make it. Honestly, I wish that those claims about Open Source software doing better during a recession turn out to be true. So far, I don’t have any reasons to not believe that this self-fullilling prophecy will fullfill itself.

There are positive signs: none of our customers face any economic problems yet. Some of them even performed better than projected during the second half of 2008 … but – you know – only the paranoid survive.

Given the overall economic climate and the general bad financial situation of the U.S., I don’t want to be overly optimistic. Nevertheless, the advantages of open source software over proprietary software in times of tight budgets are obvious. The only real problem are completely cut-down budgets…

Anyway, I wish you all a 2009 that can only become better than expected, right?