Santa Cruz, CA
For the last decade Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way. As a member of Red Hat's premier community leadership team, he helps with various community activities in the Fedora Project and other projects Red Hat is involved in. As a 15 year IT industry veteran, Karsten has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer, and developer advocate.
Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, CA with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, where they focus on growing their own food and nurturing sustainable community living.
Authored Comments
The evolution of Red Hat as a company has strong roots in a "pure source" philosophy that means that the organization has never worked on any significant codebase that was not developed in a radically transparent way.
The companies you give as examples are a bit mixed. I'm not qualified to speak about these businesses in the business sense, but I know that Novell is not steeped in the history that Suse was. Sun had a similar challenge, trying to mix two different developer cultures.
Google practices a lot of the open source way internally, from what I can tell, and does so in many ways externally. Yet everytime they don't start and run a project 100% in the open from the very start, it counterbalances that and creates a situation where they haven't lowered the barriers enough to create community participation.
Who is exciting? <a href="http://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>, makers of <a href="http://wordpress.com">Wordpress</a>. <a href="http://acquia.com">Acquia</a>, significant contributors to <a href="http://drupal.org">Drupal</a> and the vendor behind <a href="http://whitehouse.gov">WhiteHouse.gov</a> and our own <a href="https://opensource.com">opensource.com</a>. <a href="http://status.net">StatusNet</a>, makers of <a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a>. The <a href="http://wikimedia.org">WikiMedia</a> free and open empire. These groups not only have found ways to make money themselves, they have created awesome ecosystems that allow so many others to make money or profit in other ways.
These are companies who really get the open source way, and they do it by <a href="http://bit.ly/TOSWDay0">having the free and open radical transparency in place from the very beginning</a>.
In <a href="https://opensource.com/business/10/5/open-marketing-what-does-it-really-mean#comment-1571">his comment</a>, Cololel Panik essentially hits the mark on what <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/">The Open Source Way</a> means by open marketing. It's a connection back to <a href="http://www.cluetrain.com/">The Cluetrain Manifesto</a>.
First, for reference, I looked up the two marketing definitions in the original post, the one <a href="http://www.marketingpower.com/aboutama/pages/definitionofmarketing.aspx">from the American Marketing Association</a> (AMA) I found, but I didn't find the second definition, "the art of convincing others they have a need for something... for which they have no need." Is that a definition created by the author? It's valid in that is likely what many people think of marketing, and here's how it's not related to what open marketing is:
In the early days of the <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing">Fedora Marketing project</a>, one of the things <a href="http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2004-August/000006.html">we discussed</a> was the connotation of the term "marketing", how it applied to what we were doing for the Fedora Project, and especially how it affects a technical audience. People don't want <a href="http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/2004-August/000007.html">to be marketed to</a>, and there is a tenuous relationship (at best) between geek audiences and marketing/sales groups.
However, the strict definition from the AMA is actually useful to us. If we substitute in "contributors and users" for "customers, clients, partners", leaving "society" in place, we have a good working definition for what open source projects do for marketing.
<em>"The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for contributors, users, and society at large."</em>
The major difference, and the one that contrasts the Google open manifesto, is that when you actually practice radical transparency from the beginning (which is <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_loosely_organize_a_community#Practice_radical_transparency_from_day_zero">a step in The Open Source Way</a> that comes before <a href="https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_loosely_organize_a_community#Start_open_marketing_soonest">open marketing</a>), then you create a situation of trust before you begin marketing activities.
If I join a church group, and they have festivals, events, and a monthly newsletter talking about them, the festivals and events are a set of "offerings" that are marketed through the newsletter, word of mouth, etc. In that case, the market is the conversation, I am there by choice, and I'm not feeling a discomfort at the marketing activities.
It is much harder for a business to be radically transparent. There are legal and social mores to consider; for example, many people in the US are uncomfortable talking about their salary and compensation. Vendors who sell goods to a company don't want their invoice transaction history put up on a wiki for all to see. It might all be visible to the IRS in the end, but there is still a freedom of information request between the entire world and that information. Those are the social mores that come in to effect.
It is much harder to slap an open label on activities after the fact, especially when they aren't open at all. That seems more like the practice of <a href="http://www.fauxpensource.org/">fauxpen source</a>. When we have bad actors who are taking the definitions away from us, we have to decide to use new words or take back the definition. Since there are so many existing marketing professionals who can learn from The Open Source Way, it makes sense to take back "open marketing" rather than to cede that ground to the fakers.