How come open source software (OSS) guys don't like marketing? - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 25, 2008
How come open source software (OSS) guys don't like marketing?

I started writing a blogpost with that title ten months ago. Subsequently I found so much anti-marketing thinking among the open source software (OSS) community that I let it drop as a research issue. If everyone was anti-marketing then marketing would not be a dynamic in user decision making and therefore not worth me researching.

It began when I "attended" the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 event and some subsequent research led me to LinuxWatch's discussion of the event. But I started asking myself the question again in January 2008 when I read Matthew Aslett’s article, “Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum?,” on the 451 web site because maybe now almost a year later the community is beginning to realize it needs to better understand how markets work.

Red Hat, at its March 14, 2007 event, began a discussion about RHEL by bashing Microsoft. In his article, Steven Vaughn-Nichols waited until the second sentence to do the same. I wondered, “What does upgrading a UNIX server (RHEL 4 to RHEL 5) have to do with why someone would or would not upgrade from XP to Vista on a client?” There appears to be no thought given to the marketing message OSS companies are putting out and the press of course parrots back what the companies say. When talking to financial analysts and IT investment research folks like me, Red Hat is always careful to position itself as trying to migrate users from other UNIX systems, not from Windows systems.

In Aslett’s article, he anonymously talks about an OSS startup that apparently maintains a web site, provides samples of its (presumably dual-licensed) OSS product, uses a press person or PR agency, and analyzes leads. But he quotes the anonymous company’s executive as saying it “would have cost in the region of $2m in marketing to get… leads if the company was not open source.” Does the company not realize that all the activities it apparently conducts in order to save marketing dollars are marketing?

That is not normal commercial behavior, nor is it a good way to get IT users to learn about OSS products:
-- Did you ever go into buy a Camry and have the car salesperson begin the pitch by telling you what's wrong with Harley Davidson?
-- Or go looking online for a new audio system and find the web site filled with criticism of HP photo printers.
Yet this approach is standard operating procedure in the OSS community.

As for the effect on my research agenda, I quickly found that all the well funded OSS pureplays and OSS-heritage hybrids were in fact aggressively marketing their wares (I'm sure the VCs insisted on it and told them which PR agencies to use). They run webinars and seminars and user groups and conduct "direct mail" as well as advertise via Google as well as via popular web sites like ebizQ. Successful OSS guys sure seem to like marketing.

By the way, if you regularly read this blog and web page, LoopFuse is not new news. We talked to Tom and Roy last fall primarily because we like the name LoopFuse and got some good advice to pass on to those thinking of becoming OSS developers while we were at it. They know what marketing can do for OSS.