The Open Source Business

Immense changes are going on in the software market nowadays. These changes are so big, that they've started to apply in other fields of life, too. For instance there is an Open Source (OS) cartoon out on the web (Elephant's dream), there are dozens of OS books, and thousands of essays with no/limited copyright.

Snapshot from Elephant's Dream

A proof for the importance of the Open Source phenomenon is is that Thomas L. Friedman, in his bestseller, named The World is Flat, claimed that one of the 10 most important forces which have flattened (practically reformed) the World in the beginning of the 21^st century is the Open Source community.

No doubt, in the past 5-10 years, one of the most significant changes in people's life was caused by the broad spread of the internet. The Open Source world played important role in that part: e.g. the Firefox browser achieved 1/3 share in its market (in spite of the fact that it can't communicate very well with Microsoft's business programs). Or, other popular example is the Creative Commons, as a special kind of copyright. Also, there are millions of sites on the web powered by Apache web servers and MySQL database servers.

And last, but not least, there is an operating system, which is developing rapidly: the Linux. Although it hasn't got significant market share yet, it bites off bigger and bigger mouthfuls from the Windows-dominated operating systems' market pie. I hope that the Linux developers have started to understand in the recent few years that technological superiority is not the only property of a software, which can lead it to success on the market. It depends much more on that how they can „sell” it (for example, Windows Vista is worse than XP in many fields of usability, but MS has sold millions of it). Well, MS has a marketing-machine with lots of experience and knowledge, which is too big monster for a group of geeks to cope with.

But, I think, they don't even have to cope with it. Their job is to make the best software for the users. So, the main purpose of this blog is to reveal the opportunities in the business side of the Open Source World and to find out, what kind of marketing methods can be used in the popularization of Open Source Software. Furthermore, I'll be intent on posting news about the most important events, which affect the Open Source World – in the market.

I hope You'll find this blog useful!