Visibility of Contributions

From Sandro Groganz, Open Source Marketing Consultant

OSS vendors as well as those offering proprietary products using OSS components (e.g. under a BSD-style license) can market their goodwill by making their contributions to those third-party OSS components more visible.

What they get is a higher credibility in the OSS and general developer community, but also in the business world in general. This has some important side effects:

• For a growing amount of customers, the term "Open Source" is eminently respectable. Without further explanation, they will open a door for you.
• It is easier for you to find and hire good programmers who might also master a certain piece of your product.
• You can ride the "Open Source wave" e.g. in press releases, which is especially important if your end product is proprietary.
• You are ahead of the crowd when it comes to new technologies, because some of your employees are well connected.
• Your development team will not become a sect of self-believers, instead, their network of OSS developers will help them to sanity-check their expertise and to keep it on a high level.

For proprietary vendors who use OSS components, it is very important that their corporate culture is in line with OSS work patterns and ethics before they start to market their contribution efforts. Otherwise, the clash of civilization will destroy any marketing benefits.