Category Open Source

Free/Libre Open Source Software

Video Interview with Stormy Peters, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I just published a video interview with Stormy which I recorded at OSiM in Berlin.

Stormy is Executive Director, GNOME Foundation, since July 2008. Working with the Board of Directors, Advisory Board, and the GNOME Foundation members, she helps strengthening the Foundation by attracting new industry members and community contributors.

In this interview she talks about reaching consensus on marketing-related decisions with a community-driven project such as GNOME, how she plans to position GNOME, how to attract more donators, and more.

Find the interview Stormy Peters about Marketing GNOME at InitMarketing.tv.

Video Interviews about Open Source Marketing on InitMarketing.tv

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

InitMarketing.tv - Open Source Marketing VideosInitMarketing.tv has just been launched! This is where InitMarketing will publish video interviews with key figures about marketing Open Source software. Currently, there are three interviews available:

  • Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative
  • Florian Effenberger, Co-lead OpenOffice.org Marketing Project
  • Oliver Nachtrab, former Product Manager, SUSE, Open-Xchange

More interviews will be published regularly, such as with Andrew Rodaway (Director of Marketing, Canonical), Fabrizio Capobianco (CEO, Funambol), Shane Martin Coughlan (FTF Coordinator, Free Software Foundation Europe), Stormy Peters (Executive Director, Gnome Foundation), Boris Kraft (CTO, Magnolia), and more.

Thanks to all interviewees for great insights and also to Wirawan Harianto for his design work!

Watch the video interviews about Open Source marketing.

Marketing and Community- vs. Company-driven Open Source Ecosystems

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Currently, customers at InitMarketing are solely companies who want us to support them in marketing their Open Source product. Yet, we do not work for community-driven Open Source projects which usually have an association or foundation as an organizing body.

The reason is quite simple: Associations or foundations which we have been in touch with lack money and business-focused decision-making processes. It seems to be much easier for companies to provide a sufficient marketing budget and to agree on a focused marketing strategy.

The cause mainly lies in how differently the two ecosystems are structured.

Company-driven Open Source Ecosystem

Company-driven Open Source Ecosystem

An Open Source company acts as the hub in its self-created ecosystem and can leverage all business advantages which stem from its superior knowledge of the product, copyright, etc.

Community-driven Open Source Ecosystem

Community-driven Open Source Ecosystem

Community-driven ecosystems lack a business hub. Usually the core of the community is focused on further developing the source code.

Pros and Cons: Company vs. Community

Company Community
Decision making Defined reporting structures and decision makers Meritocratic community, maybe with benevolent dictator
Motivation Business-oriented, want to make money Individuals who enjoy coding good software
Communication Partially confidential Highly transparent

Of course, this is an overly simplistic comparison table. I know, there are companies that are pure chaos compared with some well working communities. Also, companies might employ their best community members over time which makes it impossible to draw a clear line between community and company. And so on… Nevertheless, the above mentioned points allow to understand the impact of the fundamental differences between a company- and a community-driven ecosystem on marketing, which I’ll discuss next.

Impact on Marketing

Communities trying to reach broad consensus will have a hard time focusing their marketing activities e.g. to clearly position their OSS project, because this requires bold decisions to spend the available budget on a specific target audience only. The higher an OSS project is in the software stack, the more this becomes a problem due to the fact that they need to attract end users and pragmatic buyers.

Open Source companies see a constant need to raise visibility through marketing to achieve better lead generation. Quite contrary, some core developers in communities might have strong prejudices against marketing and especially public relations (of course, the same can happen within a company, but the business prerogative will prevail). Additionally,  Then again, communities are quite good in spreading the word among peers.

Preparing a marketing budget is a serious issue for communities. They could collect it from system integrators who are part of the community, but they might want to invest the bulk of their marketing budget into pushing their own specific solutions and services. Nevertheless, if the main beneficiaries of an OSS project financially support general marketing efforts of the community, they will profit not only from shared development, but also from shared marketing costs.

Shared marketing is especially helpful if the OSS project is rather a platform or framework instead of an out-of-the-box solution. The danger is that community members tend to have varying views on an OSS platform. Different system integrators will use it to implement different custom solutions. The OSS project could potentially mean anything to anyone, which runs counter a sound positioning in the heads of potential new developers and customers.

In general, it is very important for OSS communities to educate themselves when it comes to marketing, which includes open discussions that result in clear decisions. While the OSS market continues to grow, so will competition. More Open Source communities will eventually take a closer look at how marketing can help them to distinguish themselves from the competition.

The Perspective of an Open Source Marketing Company

Seen from the perspective of InitMarketing, it is much easier for us to provide Open Source marketing services to companies.

The risk with communities is that discussions could take long and decisions could be delayed, which means that, potentially, InitMarketing would spend more time than we would get paid for. Additionally, OSS associations or foundations usually ask for a discount, which we are happy to provide, but which adds to the risk of not really being able to cover our costs and time investment.

There are benefits in working with OSS communities, most importantly that we could enjoy open discussions about marketing strategy, planning and implementation, because this allows anyone to see how well we do our job – or not 🙂 – and we can learn a lot from a miriad of ideas and feedback. Last but not least, InitMarketing could help communities make the jump towards more professional marketing without sacrificing the community and its spirit – a challenge we can’t wait to accept.

Quick Marketing Analysis of Interchange Open Source E-commerce Platform

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While at LinuxTag 2008, I met with Jure Kodzoman of Interchange fame. Interchange is a well established Open Source e-commerce platform, existing for over 12 years, and very popular in the USA.

We sat down to discuss from a marketing perspective the Interchange website and a brochure they created for distribution at their LinuxTag booth.

Interchange website

These are the issues I identified and some changes I proposed to Jure (which would still need some more consideration before being implemented):

  1. The current domain name of the website (icdevgroup.org) is extremely hard to remember because it does not relate to the Interchange brand. The domain needs to be in sync with the project name, hence they should move the website to a domain that includes “interchange” in its name. It need not be a .com TLD, .org or .net suffice for a community-driven OSS project.
  2. Today’s tagline ” Powering web-based applications since 1995″ does not tell that Interchange is an e-commerce platform nor that it is Open Source. Better taglines would be “The most flexible Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The first Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The Open Source Platform Powering E-commerce world-wide since 1995”. It’s a great selling point that Interchange exists since 1995 and it might be a valid claim that they are – yet another potential tagline – “The first Open Source Alternative for E-commerce”.
  3. The Interchange website lacks a concise welcome blurb on the front page. This makes it very hard to visitors new to Interchange understand what it is about. A sample welcome blurb: “Interchange is powering e-commerce since 1995. Its proven and highly flexible open source platform provides the building blocks to assemble individual online shop solutions. Interchange can be easily configured to grow with your business.”
  4. It is better to communicate only one major news on the front page through a banner especially to guide new visitors. For example, don’t advertise LinuxTag in one banner plus a general banner plus a banner about the Interchange 5.6 release in the same space. Instead, highlight the 5.6 release in a banner, provide a link to a landing page and at that landing page, say: “Come to LinuxTag and get a hands-on demo”.

Blogging Turns Open Source Developers into Sales People

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Open Source companies can nicely take advantage of the positive effects of blogging: Markets are conversations. Weblogs are a powerful medium of communication, because they provide first-hand information about Open Source products. In a way, Weblogs even turn core developers into sales people, because with every blog entry they seamlessly sell the product to other developers.

Weblogs are an efficient way of learning how to non-obtrusively sell an Open Source product. The simple fact that a Weblog requires you to

  • actually write down what you think
  • take into account the interests of your target audience

lets Open Source bloggers start to think in terms of selling and marketing the product. With their Weblog, they go out there and show what the product is capable of doing and why they enjoy using it. Additionally, the way that Weblogs allow for interactive communication (e.g. via commenting functionality) creates a style of communication that is based on very similar principles like the underlying beliefs of successful sales.

Hence, you can use Weblogs to subtly coach employees of an Open Source company in learning how to effectively communicate to a larger audience. Weblogs will also foster the exchange of information within an Open Source company to raise understanding about the product. For example, a new employee might start blogging about the product and asks his colleagues for advice whenever unsure about some technical specifics. The pure fact that he does not want to make himself look like a fool when writing something wrong in his Weblog, will help clarify things for him, maybe also for other colleagues and the public.

Greg is right in claiming that there aren’t any hard and fast rules when it comes to best practices for coprorate blogging: “Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.” Which means that personality counts in blogging and I would add that this is also true for Open Source sales.

Given that Open Source companies can reach maximum distribution with a product freely available for download to anyone, blogging nicely aligns with this freeconomics approach, because it allows Open Source companies to reach their diverse world-wide target audience with information freely readable by anyone and to sell it non-obtrusively as well as cost-efficiently.

Defining the Target Audience of an Open Source Software Company

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Without understanding the target audience, Open Source businesses will not be able to effectively communicate with those who are supposed to buy their products, support, services and contribute to software development.

Ideally, the target audience has been defined in the corporate marketing strategy. Although this might seem obvious, most of the Open Source companies we work with at InitMarketing have a rather vague idea about whom they want to talk and sell to. The following reasons are typical:

  • Open Source start ups have usually only broadly defined a go-to-market strategy and target audience in their business plan, which is good enough for their VCs who are rather interested in the grand picture which allows them to assess the business potential.
  • Those Open Source companies who have in the past years organically grown their business from a one or two man show of developers to 10-30 staff members have always somehow made money with their product. They intuitively understand their target audience, but never reflected upon it to expand their business more quickly with a focused marketing strategy.
  • Even large to super-large corporations who are in the Open Source business much too often lack a good understanding of their target audience. The reason being that business decisions of top management (such as “let’s start to port our software to Linux”) are being executed with poor strategic guidelines.

The Branding and Positioning page in my Wiki provides some ideas how to address the needs of your target audience – but how to understand them? Will you have to pay expensive market analysis programs? No, you don’t, because informed intuition comes to the rescue plus the fact that Open Source allows for incremental marketing.

Geoffrey A. Moore defines informed intuition in his classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm:

The key is to understand how intuition – specifically, informed intuition – actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images – really, data fragments – that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. […] so in marketing can whole target-customer populations become imagined as teenyboppers, yuppies, pickups and gun racks. These are all just images – stand-ins for a greater reality – picked out from a much larger set of candidate images on the grounds that they really “click” with the sum total of an informed person’s experience.

In his book, Moore further describes how to define sample scenarios that allow to understand the user, technical buyer and economic buyer. In essence, the definition of a target audience should be able to answer this little question: Why does your product matter?

Given that many of today’s successful Open Source businesses are alternatives to closed source competitors (e.g. Linux vs. Microsoft, MySQL vs. Oracle), it is quite easy for them to imagine their target audience. Such Open Source products are being used by developers, hence it is mostly developers developing for developers. To define a target audience, such companies basically just need to look at themselves.

The higher Open Source moves up the stack, the more important it becomes for Open Source software vendors and their partner companies to focus on end user needs, a target audience very different from how software programmers think. One example would be SugarCRM who successfully communicate to sales and marketing personnel across various industries.

Due to the Open Source development mantra release early, release often, companies can adjust their understanding of the target audience gradually at minimum risk, but only if they also follow the mantra of incremental marketing: communicate often, communicate early. They will automagically learn to understand their target audience as long as they make sure that they allow for interactive external communication for example through an online forum on their website and establish good internal communication within their organization between the development, marketing and sales teams.

The combination of informed intuition and incremental marketing forms a general business advantage for Open Source companies, because it allows them to minimize the risk of being guided by prejudices when it comes to understanding the target audience.

Incrementally Marketing an Open Source Product Launch to Win Your First Customers

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

There is no need to spend a fortune in marketing dollars to launch a new Open Source product. You can create substantial buzz with a low marketing budget to win your first customers.

The basic rules are:

  1. Don’t think big, think smart: Acquire a bootsrapper’s state of mind.
  2. Communicate early, communicate often: For every step of your software development and release process, think of a related small marketing initiative.

The good thing about Open Source software is that there is nothing to hide. You can inform the public and let it participate in your project from the second you had the idea of building it. The openness of the Open Source development model allows low budget micro-marketing on the internet to build an ecosystem with emerging sales leads even before the product is ready for production use.

The benefits of launching a product the Open Source Marketing way are:

  • Less error-prone: Just like the OSS model allows developers to modify the software incrementally based on feedback from a growing community, so does it allow Open Source Marketing to adjust campaigns on-the-fly based on interactive communication.
  • Immediate results: Instead of spending a lot of time upfront on developing an optimal marketing solution, incremental and satisficing steps allow to achieve immediate marketing results with a very basic product marketing strategy to start from.
  • Risk reduction: An OSS company can gradually grow its marketing efforts from tiny initiatives focusing on a very specific and small audience to large-scale global media campaigns in parallel to a growing customer base and confidence through an adaptive marketing approach.

Here are some sample marketing actions, applicable on different stages of the product development life cycle:

  1. You got an idea about a new OSS product? Why not discuss it on your blog right from the start and invite others to comment on your thoughts? Most likely, you will get some good input that will allow you to tweak your idea and save money on business consulting. Furthermore, you have planted the first seed for growing a community related to your upcoming product by attracting visionaries.
  2. Get the product website ready a month or two before you make the source code available. Provide a registration form where everyone can subscribe and get notified once you publish the code. This is how you can collect leads. You can later turn the notification service into a newsletter where you inform about upcoming releases.
  3. Make the source code available publicly ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet (a perfectionist’s trap), get the software out there and continue developing it in SVN. There are plenty of great developers who enjoy trying out a cool new OSS product even in pre-alpha state. Maybe one of them will become a contributor and early adopter?
  4. Of course, you will keep blogging about the progress of your development and business efforts to attract new community members and to increase loyalty of those already observing or participating in what you are doing.
  5. It’s time for an alpha release. Create a blog about it, with brief general information about your product, including business benefits. If applicable, include some screenshots as well. Link to the installation documentation you wrote. Nicely ask some of your peers to blog about the release and to refer to your blog entry or the product website.
  6. For the beta release, it might make sense to contact a PR or marketing agency (I heard of InitMarketing providing all sorts of OSS marketing services 🙂 ) who help you to create some buzz in the blogosphere. Set up an invitation-only online demo which will allow you to collect some more leads. Include a screencast on the product website that explains what your software does and what it’s good for.

Once you have reached the beta release milestone, you might want to employ a marketing expert or outsource some marketing work to an agency. After the beta release you might start to charge for support, especially installation and configuration to companies who can afford that – make sure that you still help out those with related questions on the forum for free.

Additionally some early adopters might consider using your software in production based on their good impression of the beta release and once the stable version is out. These potential customers share your vision of the product and see the same business benefits as you do. They might pay you for standby support , consulting, customizing.

Inexpensive prosumer software and social media marketing tools allow you to decide for each task of a marketing action if you want to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The same choice that OSS customers can make between investing time (install, configure, extend yourself) or money (get support and services from the OSS vendor) is true for OSS companies marketing their product.

For example, do you want to create the product screencast yourself or have a marketing agency record it? Do you want to upload it to YouTube or run your own video streaming platform? This choice allows you to keep your marketing efforts for a product launch low at the beginning and to expand your marketing budget over time as revenue grows.

Microsoft's Open Source Dilemma and Diplomacy

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

It would not be too far fetched to talk about some of Microsoft’s PR talk related to Open Source as driven by a burned lands strategy in the past years.

Let’s leave the past behind. Let’s assume that Microsoft is seriously concerned about interoperability and openness. Let’s assume they are trying to understand how the Open Source business works and want to engage with Open Source companies in a friendly manner. Let’s not discuss whether Microsoft opens their APIs due to a self-decided business strategy or whether the EU made them make the decision.

Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

To understand the position Microsoft is in from a marketing communications perspective, take a look at the following analogy: Imagine a country that invaded a foreign land and actually burned the lands to defeat its inhabitants, but without military success. The invaded country was able to defend itself and won the war. Imagine business men of the aggressor country coming back one year after the war trying to establish business relationships.

As a citizen of the invaded country – would you trust those business men?

I can imagine that those Microsoft employees who by their corporate role and conviction sincerely want to establish mutually beneficial relationships with Open Source companies and communities face mistrust. They are often being accused of the “old crimes” and are being seen as the enemy.

As of today, Microsoft is in the middle of constant crisis management with Open Source. To get out of it, it seems Microsoft is rightly entering an era of diplomacy and friendly (naturally somewhat unclear) statements which are supposed to help grow trust between Microsoft and the Open Source community. This effort of small and large steps will have to balance naysayers as well as yaysayers to produce realistic results. Hence, it will be important for Microsoft to stay focused and committed.

While at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum and OSBC, one could witness Microsoft’s diplomacy at work:

  • “Open Source is here to stay”, said Sam Ramji at the OSS ISV forum and Brad Smith mentioned during his keynote at OSBC: “We at Microsoft appreciate the important role that Open Source plays.”
  • During his OSBC keynote, Brad Smith eloquently apologized for Bill Gates and Steve Balmer once calling Open Source communism and cancer: “Ultimately, people are not caricatures. They get up in the morning. They get smarter. The industry evolves. And you want that. You don’t want people to have to live with the caricatures and stay with those caricatures.”

Even to Microsoft, Open Source has proven to be a viable and lucrative business – why else would they partner with Open Source vendors? From there, it is just one more step for Microsoft to adopt Open Source business strategies themselves for relevant products or parts of them.

With Microsoft being a company relying on partners for 96% of its revenues, it will be highly important to drive innovation by building its partner network not only on top of commercial interests and proprietary software, but also on merit and fame for great software development achievements – a huge benefit of Open Source communities.

Microsoft needs to leave behind the scorched earth policies that clearly don’t work. Microsoft’s top executives need to re-state and re-assure that they want to live in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with Open Source. Most of all, Microsoft will have to accept that patent gimmicks won’t get them anywhere in their quest to play nicely with the Open Source community.

Otherwise, Microsoft will continue to cripple itself when it comes to additional strategic business options available with Open Source – not being able to apply OSS business strategies to some of their own products or growing cooperation with OSS vendors and projects. The intended acquisition of Yahoo! will be ill-fated without Microsoft successfully building a good relationship with the Open Source community, given that prominent community members such as PHP’s Rasmus Lerdorf are key to Yahoo!’s success.

The goal for Microsoft is to get past the point where they rely on the Open Source community giving them the benefit of the doubt and instead leverage the potentials of Open Source to Microsoft’s own advantage based on trustful relationships with the cathedrals and the bazaars.

Open Source CMS Companies Wanted for EU Project Proposal

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Wolfgang Maass contacted me and asked if I would like to join the board of experts of an EU project they are going to propose. They are actually also looking for Open Source CMS companies (vendors or system integrators) who would like to join as a partner.

The EU project proposal entitled „Interactive Knowledge“ is currently being developed by a consortium which is led by Salzburg Research. The objective is to develop a “next generation semantic content management framework” based on existing frameworks, but with significant technological improvements ranging from RDF-storage to easy definition of workflows and business rules, and to dynamically re-configurable web interfaces.

Some more info on the objectives in Wolfgang’s words:

Our experience is that many smaller content management solution providers find it hard to make full use of the new standards such as RDF and CSS 3.0 when it comes to keeping solutions maintainable, re-usable or when it comes to cross-media publishing on mobile and other platforms. Increasingly, content management needs to interface with the “Internet of things”, e.g. you can get additional health information about a certain food product, by entering the retail store’s product code into a web-based content management system or into your mobile PA.

This is what the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project will offer:

  • 50 smaller CMS companies can become early adopters (small grants of up to 12.000 Euro are possible)
  • 7 European SMEs who have content management systems will be offered to become full partners in this project and act as requirements experts as well as getting their own frameworks benchmarked with respect to their semantic capabilities. There are budgets between 80.000 and 200.000 Euro available, at a funding rate of 75%.

So, the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project proposal is an excellent opportunity to benefit from a large scale R&D effort.

I know Wolfgang for quite some time and he told me that the project administrators have a very good track record in this type of project, are experts in the field and can assist with the administrative entry hurdles. This is good, because it will avoid that the EU bureaucracy and lazy project partners will eat up your valuable resources. I know how important this is because I have experience as a work package leader on behalf of eZ Systems of the successfully finished tOSSad EU project.

If you are interested, please send an email to wolfgang dot maass at hs-furtwangen dot de no later than this Thursday, March 20th, 2008.

See you at the kick-off meeting after the EU accepted the proposal 🙂