Does Open Source Need Marketing & Segmentation?
For many (Cherkoff 2005), open source is meant to be a disruptive business model where the conventional laws of business and marketing don’t apply, e.g., it’s ideally meant to be the ultimate in “viral marketing” (Rushkoff 1994, Helm 2000, Skrob 2005) or “guerrilla marketing” (Levinson 1984), where only interested parties raise their hands and volunteers give their time and/or money to the cause, and where you don’t need to spend much time or money on traditional marketing. While that may be the case for some open source projects, especially those that don’t need to make money, and while it may work for start-ups and early stage projects (Rosenberg 2005), established commercial open source companies need to determine how they can monetize the interest in their software, ideally without disturbing the open source philosophy that differentiates their software from commercial offerings. This is where time-honored marketing principles and best practices apply (among the others, Baker 2000,
