Open Source Marketing, The Basics

It's interesting to talk about the marketing of a thing which covers a free, and freely variable product. But, in any case, we are talking about a viable method, because many advertisers from the old line find it a real threat.

So let's see, what are the main differences:

- Marketing channels: we can forget the traditional channels. There are so few paid advertisements in newspapers, which are promoting free or open source software. They're expensive and don't provide enough interactivity.
- Incomes come from different sources. At traditional products, the main source of income is the price of the product itself, and the complementary products are usually free, or make a smaller part of the company incomes (e.g. "Would You like an A/C into your car?"). In the Open Source Marketing model (OSM) the product itself is for free, and the sources of the main incomes are the complementary products/services (You get the manual how to build your car, but if you want somebody to make it instead of You, you'll probably have to pay for it). (Note: nowadays many old-line products have their main incomes from complementary products, e.g. blades are more expensive than complete razors)

- Because of these things above, an open source product needs much bigger spread to be profitable than a traditional one (popularity is needed for selling accesories, and for advertisers also). That's the answer why Canonical isn't yet profitable despite the fact that their open source operating system (Ubuntu) is running on millions of PC's.

- The role of Word-of-Mouth (WoM) is increased. The engine of OSM is the community, who are often keen on the product, that's why they recommend it to their friends with enthusiasm. And their friends are willing to try it, because it's totally free, they won't feel that somebody wants their money in the background, like in many MLM systems.

- Moreover, the traditional provider-client relationship is often irrelevant in the OSM, because each user can easily become part of the development team (well, this is usually not true for the complementary services...)

I could write pages about this topic (and I will, but not now, and not in one post :)), that's one of the main topics of this blog. Recommended article: http://www.collaboratemarketing.com/open_source_marketing/

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!