I ran across this very thorough and thought-leadership blog post recently by Paul Young, director of Product Management at Netstreams. Like me, he apparently is not directly part of the open source software (OSS) movement but analyzes its dynamics from his career perspective.
His perspective is product management, mine is marketing. His findings are similar to opinions I have posted on the need for open source developers to use marketing and market research techniques IF they want to provide software that will be adopted in the marketplace.
The IF is the key word. IF you just want to "scratch an itch," as Paul describes the issues currently ongoing in the Pidgin OSS community, that's OK too. Just let the rest of us know which it is.
But IF you want to "take it to market," whatever that means to you, you not only need the kind of marketing and market research I describe but the related product management Paul describes. And if you expect venture funding, the VCs will insist on it.
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