For years, open-source advocates like myself have fixated on freedom. "Don't get locked in!" has been our rallying cry to the teeming masses, yearning to be free from the shackles of proprietary lock-in. "Stop feeding your firstborn sons to the beast in Redmond!"
At Tuesday's Open Source Forum in London, however, "freedom" took a back seat to cost reduction, performance, and IT efficiency. Not surprisingly, the message was even more warmly received, and probably will result in far greater uptake of open-source software than the freedom cry.
The reason is simple: people get paid to get work done. The chief information officer of Company X has a job to do, and that job doesn't entail weekday freedom fighting, battling software overlords down on Canary Wharf. Rather, her job is to make the IT trains run on time, and while open source likely plays an increasingly prominent role in this, its importance has less to do with high ideals than high performance.
Open source, in other words, is winning because it works, not because it's saving the planet.
Some persist in selling technology, open source and otherwise, based on ideology. That's why Opera's "Freedom!" message for Opera Unite falls so flat, as Chris Messina points out:
What I find so fascinating about this marketing message is that it presumes that owning one's own data and "connecting directly" with friends is somehow relevant to people - as though it's a big problem that people have been complaining about for years, and that Opera has finally answered the call.
But I think they're missing the big picture here - or intentionally obscuring it -which is that, while the idea of owning your own data may be attractive to neo-libertarians and open source geeks - most people really don't care and are happy to outsource storage of their data to someone else who can be responsible for backing up their data and fending off hackers. 200 million Facebook users can't be wrong, right?
The appeal for this sort of message is so limited as to be nearly useless. Tim O'Reilly recently suggested that open sourcerers often fixate on the wrong thing (licensing), overlooking the real promise and mechanics for ensuring openness on the Web (data, APIs, participation, etc.).
Add to that the wrong message ("You have nothing to lose but your chains!") and you have a recipe for reaching a niche audience. Open source can do better.
Freedom is important, but if Iran has taught us anything, it's that there are far more important freedoms in this world than the right to modify software.
It's time for the marketing message around open source to move beyond "and justice for all." Cost savings, performance boosts, etc. are far more relevant to likely adopters of open source. Such open-source customers are less concerned by the intricacies of open-source business models than they are by tangible returns on their open-source investments.
It's the new open-source pragmatism. Try it, you might like it.
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TechCrunch tells us Web 2.0, at least as a buzz word, is dead, with Google Trends data suggesting that 2008 saw the term drop consistently and then precipitously as a matter of search interest.
I'm sure this is right, but I'm just as sure that it doesn't matter.
Tim O'Reilly, who coined the term "Web 2.0," has a knack for spotting trends and then moving on once they become less interesting. For him, that usually means once the rest of us have caught on and once the technology or trend in question is in monetization mode.
O'Reilly was also on the forefront of spotting and nurturing the open-source movement. When it went mainstream (boy, has it gone mainstream) and became something to harvest financially rather than to define and structure intellectually, O'Reilly started looking for the next big trend--one that, intriguingly, learned much from the principles of open source.
That "something" was Web 2.0.
For several years, O'Reilly was the prophet of the Web 2.0 revolution. But now that Web 2.0 has to figure out how to pay for itself, not simply change the way we interact online, I suspect O'Reilly is moving on to other things like green energy.
This, perhaps more than anything else, will signal that it's time for Wall Street and the money changers to delve into Web 2.0 in earnest. If O'Reilly moves on to tackle another big trend, it means he, at least, believes enough definition has been laid for Web 2.0 to serve as signposts to financial profiteering from it.
The real money in open source is being made now, years after it started to significantly disrupt the cozy software ecosystem. In similar ways, now that interest in Web 2.0 is dying down as a marketing buzzword, interest in its principles as a corporate revenue-generation strategy will most assuredly rise.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time.
Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market.
As I write this, Red Hat's market capitalization sits at $2.62 billion, while Sun is just ahead, at $2.7 billion. The stock prices are way out of whack with revenues: Red Hat pulled in $627 million in 2008. Sun? More than $13 billion.
Such is Wall Street's confidence in Red Hat's Linux focus, however, that the market capitalizations between the two companies are almost at parity.
Both companies, of course, have product portfolios beyond Linux or Unix. Sun, in particular, has been significantly expanding its portfolio to include full systems that comprise software (OS, database, storage, portals, etc.), services, and hardware.
Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's. But for now, a symbolic moment is about to occur. The inauguration of the Linux-based economy?
While 2008 has been a bleak year for the financial markets and the global economy, it has been very kind to open source, at least based on market share. A review of Net Applications data suggests that there has never been a better time for open source; however, as Google Trends data suggests, it's no longer enough to rest on one's open-source laurels.
- Number of projects. In terms of sheer numbers of open-source projects, as well as traffic to those projects, open source was on a tear in 2008, with SourceForge alone increasing its hosted projects by 10 percent.
- Browsers. Firefox has cracked 20 percent of the market, while Google Chrome has topped 1 percent. Internet Explorer has dropped month over month for nearly 12 straight months in 2008. As IE falls toward 50 percent market share we will, as Glyn Moody suggests, get a taste of real browser competition again.
- Operating systems. Windows, too, has been on a slide, though at 89 percent of the market, it's hardly in a weak position right now. Linux and Mac have both gained at its expense, with the latter taking a real bite (over 1 percent) out of the Redmond giant. But for Mac and Linux, the real market to watch isn't the desktop, but rather the mobile (or nearly mobile) market, where Mac and Linux have real consumer advantages.
- Commercialization. 2008 saw Red Hat and Novell Linux (and JBoss, in the case of Red Hat) revenue jump dramatically, as Sun also saw Open Storage and MySQL revenue climb significantly. But the real story may be in private data. My own company doubled its sales (again), while I know from conversations with executives at SugarCRM, MindTouch, JasperSoft, and other open-source vendors that their sales were on a tear, too. Separately, we're still talking about relatively small amounts of money (under $50 million), but collectively...? Commercial open source is coming into its own.
- General interest. Intriguingly, "open source" as a search term has been on the decline for years, as shown below, but I think this is a positive development. In light of the above, I read this decline to suggest that people are less interested in generic open source and more demanding of specific open-source projects. Does Hadoop meet my needs, in other words, not is it open source? This is a sign of maturity, not weakness. It's a sign of open source going mainstream, as Sun's Zack Urlocker suggests.
"Open Source" search on the decline
(Credit: Google Trends)It has been a banner year for open source, just as it has been since at least 2000. I suspect that 2009 will be much the same...only better.
In the midst of Ars Technica's review of the utility of free online music, the tech site notes something of critical importance to open source, too:
As free music becomes common, though, the real battle will shift to marketing/press/PR. When a few acts are releasing free albums, it's easy for listeners to sample them; when everyone does it, artists are suddenly competing for people's time and attention, and even free downloads won't be enough to attract listeners without building some buzz.
Exactly. At one time it was enough to be the "open source Exchange" or the "open source Siebel" or whatever. No longer. There's simply too much open-source software out there to stand out as the "open-source XXXX." You have to market the "XXXX" if you want to have a hope of success.
Yes, open source remains a viable development methodology, one that can deliver exceptional software. But it's not enough. To be disruptive, open source also requires viral distribution. The hidden requirement in all of this is that someone has to care enough about the project in the first place to download it, and then talk about it and spur further distribution.
The "caring" aspect? That's marketing.
Open-source companies and community projects that don't invest in marketing will fail. This may not mean traditional marketing (e.g., print advertising, email campaigns, etc.) and, in fact, probably does not. But it must involve some element of getting the word out.
Otherwise, who will know to download and try it out?
You may have noticed late last week that Linspire was officially retired. Or perhaps you didn't. No matter. Given Linspire's rocky history with the GPL and its inability to get traction with consumers, it's an unsurprising move as Xandros seeks to consolidate its assets.
Of perhaps more note is the fact that the Open Source Applications Foundation finally released version 1.0 of its Chandler program. Glyn Moody tries to put a happy face on the release, but the fact is that it's several years too late. It was a good idea back when it was launched but, as Glyn writes, as a "very definite, but *abstract*, idea" it failed miserably.
Note to other open-source projects: "Abstract" worked for Picasso. It won't for you.
Perhaps the lesson in both Linspire and Chandler is just how hard it is to build a strong consumer-facing business. For those who pooh-pooh Microsoft's success as "mere marketing" I have a suggestion: You need to get into this "mere marketing" business. It has a way of driving adoption. It matters.
Sam Varghese writes a provocative slam on the open-source spinmeister over on ITWire. His basic premise is that open-source spinmeisters like Blake Stowell (of SCO infamy) are on the rise. They are, apparently, everywhere.
The problem with this view is that he doesn't substantiate it at all. He may be right, but when I started to survey the projects and companies I know I kept drawing a blank on the mysterious yet apparently omnipresent spinmeisters.
Who are these people that attach themselves to open-source projects, do nothing, and yet become the public face of open-source projects? I guess they've failed because I can't think of any. He suggests that these people get by through deception:
... Read moreCIO.com profiles the rise of Alfresco to prove its point that open source married to marketing is a very good match, but the same is true of an increasing number of open-source projects. They're no longer about random itches and corresponding scratches.
Open source is big business, and becomes bigger every day. Bigger, in part, because of the marketing dollars that increasingly feed it:
Instead of a project that began with the attitude of "My Dad has a barn; let's put on a play!" the Alfresco team started with a core competency in content management and looked for new market opportunities.... Read more
Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing. They write:
The sooner an open source company comes to grip with the reality that it needs to practice standard marketing techniques such as segmentation, target marketing, and direct marketing, the better it will be.
... Read more
Ian Howells
(Credit: eBizQ)I accidentally stumbled across this article by my colleague, Ian Howells (Chief Marketing Officer, Alfresco), on marketing strategies for open-source companies. Ian is a smart guy, and this article is quite good.
Ian's background is in the marketing of proprietary software (SeeBeyond and Documentum, primarily), but he's learned a great deal in his past two years with Alfresco. I particularly like his idea on the need for open-source companies to build new markets or extend old markets, rather than cannibalize old markets:
A simplistic view of open source strategy is to target a big, greedy, lazy incumbent enterprise software vendor and offer a lower-priced alternative. ... Read more
