OpenSource

OS Software & Content

Open Source Marketing

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My main interest in open source is the way in which it has turned the tables on who has power in the marketplace. OS Software gives a leg up to the small business that’s trying to enter the market. Now open source marketing seems to be the next target of the revolution (which, by the way, will not be televised). A recent article by Hans-Peter Brondmo shows what open source means to marketing:

What if advertising and marketing materials were published with a Creative Commons license, perhaps requiring attribution but otherwise encouraging, rather than prohibiting, derivative works? What if the goal were less to restrict and control the use of images but rather to encourage derivative use? Let’s call it open-source marketing.

Under this model, blogging about a company, product, or service would be encouraged by said company as a rule, not an exception.

Open-source marketing encourages openness and discussion, facilitates debate and idea sharing. It encourages free downloads of the finished ad and the "source code" — all the storyboards, video clips, raw animation, text copy, sound files, and other components — used to construct the advertisement. Open-source marketing enlists the audience to take a message, an image, or a jingle and "improve" it by creating derivative works. It encourages consumers to not just consume and critique, but to engage, improve, and redistribute improvements if the original doesn’t work or measure up.

This could mean a real shift in the way marketing is done, and may spell decreased revenues for marketing firms. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

The open-source movement has taken the world by storm. Get ready for it to turn its sights on marketing and advertising. Marketing has long promised interactivity, but it’s remained more myth than reality. Maybe we got it wrong. Perhaps what people want isn’t click-and-branch "interactive" marketing. Perhaps what they want is creative freedom and control. Perhaps what they want is open-source marketing.

Next month: how open-source software and cheap creative tools affect marketing by gradually commoditizing high-cost, proprietary approaches and lowering entry barriers.


This commoditizing of services and products is one of the major effects of open source. It forces those with proprietary systems to constantly innovate their upper-end products, because open source is driving the lower-end prices to zero. This is happening in real estate with companies like Property Guys, who offer a DIY real estate service for a few hundred dollars, versus the thousands that you will pay an agent. Once internet usage is ubiquitous, it may be faster to sell your house yourself, without the middle-man. How many other industries will be affected by the changing economics of open source?

Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business

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Last week I worked on a co-authored paper describing the value of collaboration in the learning industry in New Brunswick. After completing my draft of the paper, I came across this comprehensive paper by the Institute for the Future. I found it through a reference via Jon Husband that led to this post and reference on The Happy Tutor. The latter is not quite what some people would consider family reading.

The paper, from June 2004 (852 kb PDF), is entitled Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business. It’s a deep link that you cannot find from the main website, and I’m not sure if this was intended or not. The authors are Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Kathi Vian. The questions posed are:

  • How can new insights about the dynamics of cooperation help us identify new and lucrative models for organizing production and wealth creation that leverage win-win dynamics?
  • How can organizations enhance their creativity and grow potential innovation with cooperation-based strategic models?

The paper then goes on to discuss seven lenses, from diverse fields such as mathematics, biology, sociology, technology, law and economics, psychology, and political science, through which to view cooperation and collective behaviour. The seven lenses are: synchrony, symbiosis, group selection, catalysis, commons, collective action, and collective intelligence.

This paper does not claim to be a definitive work but it is a neat synthesis of work in many fields that may lead us to a better understanding of how cooperation may be the best strategy for economic growth and prosperity. It also puts many other ideas into perspective – such as Reed’s Law which I’ve previously discussed (see the map on page 5).

There is a lot to review, or read for the first time. The last section is probably the most interesting for those trying to develop a new business strategy.

When we look across these opportunities and think of some of the fundamental dilemmas that businesses face, we find five key areas of potential innovation and disruption to business as usual.

Knowledge-generating collectives

Adaptive resource management

Collective readiness and response

Sustainable business organisms

Peer-to-peer politics

The authors then go on to describe the implications of recent innovations in each of these areas.

Overall, this is a great read.

Try Out OpenSource CMS

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OpenSource CMS has completely revamped its site and now includes easy access to dozens of PHP/MySQL-based Content Management Systems. Now you can try before you install.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

The list includes Drupal, which this site runs on, and two others that I have used, Tikiwiki and Mambo. There are also some elearning CMS, like ATutor (which I have used) and Moodle (which I will soon be using). This is one big virtual sandbox for you to play in.

Open Source Conference Proceedings

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Last May 2004, the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto webcast their conference on Open Source and Free Software: Concepts, Controversies, and Solutions. It was webcast using the KMDI ePresence system, soon to be released as open source. The archived sessions include my own area of interest, "Open Source Business Models". Here is a summary from a small piece of Matt Asay’s (Novell) presentation:

There are essentially three OSS business models:

  1. Product Proprietary or Commodity Model
  2. Commodity (Brand & Servicing) Model, e.g. Red Hat: make money from your services
  3. Transitional (Pragmatic) Model. The transitional model is focused on solving problems (e.g. MySQL and JBoss) and is open source in the sense that code is open, but may be closed in terms of controlling the development process and the developers.

Asay says that open source is continously commoditizing software, forcing proprietary vendors to enhance and innovate their products, or "drive it up the stack" as he says. Here’s one more item to think about:

Q: What is the main reason that people develop open source software?
A: Because it is intellectually stimulating.

Sessions are available as QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real. Sit back and enjoy these highly interesting sessions. Thanks to William Langley of the NRC for pointing this out.

The End of the Commons?

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Stephen Downes notes that Creative Commons may be
moving too far to the commercial side of things.

In various fora I have warned of the danger that Creative Commons will commercialize. It would be too great a temptation, I argued, to create special ‘business’ Creative Commons licenses for commercial content, possibly charging a fee for managing the license. When the Creative Commons ‘Education’ licenses were proposed a few months ago, I warned that this was first step in the process …. That day has now come. The commercialization of Creative Commons has taken a large step forward with the development of what is being called the ‘Commonwealth’.

I hope that this is not the case, but the future will tell. I agree with Stephen, and feel that CC should have a better medium for input from the great unwashed commons, especially since their success is predicated on the millions who have taken up the CC banner. I will be keeping an eye on the commercialization of CC, and you will know that I have parted ways with their philosophy if the CC License at the bottom of my pages disappears.

Update: 19 August – Creative Commons clarifies its position on the Commonwealth.

OSS Interface Elegance

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Steve Garrity made a post on interface elegance back in April, and a number of people commented. I think that it provides a good view of the design and development process in open source, and not being much of a geek I found it enlightening. Steven discusses the issue of feature creep in open source, and how this has been addressed in Firefox. I am a recent convert to Firefox. The conclusion of the article sums things up nicely:

Rather than adding more and more features for the mythical “power user”, or swing to the other end of the spectrum and dumb-down the interface for the mythical “average user”, smart developers are learning that good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience.

We are seeing the open source development community becoming much more market-sensitive (in its own way, in accordance with its own values) and I think that this bodes well for the future. With better interface design, open source software will be more acceptable to the average user, thus levelling the playing field for software developers.

If open source ever gets significant market penetration it may also change the dominant business model. In the near future, any software without customer support (proprietary or open source) may have no financial worth, and only the support services will have any market value.

Web Browsers

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I switched to Mozilla Firefox as my browser a while back, as I was getting concerned about all of the IE security alerts. I like Firefox, especially the tab feature, and will stay with it. It seems that I’m not really an early adopter though, as Cory Doctorow points out in Boing Boing that a Microsoft presenter at the BlogOn conference asked how many people were using Internet Explorer, and no one raised their hand. Things can change fast on the Net.