The potential for successfully building or extending a corporate
identity based on Open Source depends on a company’s relationship
towards an Open Source product. The graph below relates the
extend of product ownership to the level of awareness potentially
available for marketing:
Basically, the more you own the product, i.e. the more it is
directly correlated to your company, the more you can make out of
it.
If you’re the creator of the product (e.g. MySQL, the company, is the creator of MySQL, the database), you can utilize maximum awareness in your market. Your whole ecosystem will support your marketing efforts. For example, those providing extensions to your product, will automatically market your product while promoting their extension.
If you’re an external contributor to a product (e.g. providing patches with bug fixes), you …
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