Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

Alfresco launched the Alfresco Content Community earlier this year to offer easy access to documentation, answers to frequently asked questions, sample applications, white papers, recordings of webinars, training material and presentations from community meetings. Open source communities are about two way conversations and when users join they are asked details on their preference for operating system, application server, portal and database. Newsletter surveys have also drilled down on user’s preferences and how they differ between evaluation and deployment. This information allows Alfresco to prioritize the platforms and combinations of platforms, in the modern stack, that Alfresco runs on.

It also allows Alfresco to perform scalability stress testing and benchmarks on key stack blueprints. This in turn benefits the community at large.

The information also allows us to look for answers to questions such as:

• How and where is open source growing?
• Is this growth different in different parts of the stack?
• Is there a clear leader in each element of the stack?
• Is usage varying between evaluation to deployment?
• Are there differences by geography? What are the trends over time?

Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer were:

Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.

Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.

Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.

Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.

Geography: The US is leading the open source charge following by countries such as France, Spain and Germany where Government adoption is a catalyst for change.

A detailed report can be accessed at: http://Opensourcebarometer.org

The Community can be accessed at: http://www.alfresco.com/community/register/?source=community

The “Open Source Barometer” will be published twice a year and this blog will provide more regular updates on trends. So when you join the Alfresco Content Community what you say counts

In my previous post I wrote on “A Marketing Model for Open Source”. I finished by saying

“Open source has to have a different approach to the massive gorilla software companies of today. It can’t use its dominant position to force its platform. There is a better way. I’ll explore alternative models for different types of companies later.”

I recently read an article by Mary Jo Foley called “SharePoint: the next big “Operating system from Microsoft“. In this article it says:

• “is it correct to think of SharePoint as almost like an OS (operating system)”? “Bingo.”
• “So how does Microsoft keep the growing family of business services it is introducing tethered to on-premise software”
• “SharePoint Server is the answer. Not Windows. Not Windows Server. Not Office. SharePoint.”
• “Ballmer told the Convergence questioner he was dead-on in his thinking.”
• “Ballmer also provided one of the most succinct definitions of SharePoint Server I’ve heard from any Microsoft exec. SharePoint is just like Office; it’s a bunch of point products gathered together into a suite.”

This got me to thinking about Gorillas (Microsoft) and “The Platform Play”. There is an excellent book called “The Marketing Playbook” by John Zagula and Richard Tong. It details the plays they used “during their years of spearheading the marketing efforts that drove Microsoft Windows and Office to global dominance.”

A summary of how the book outlines the Platform Play is as follows:

Market

• “Inherently the Platform Play is about defending and expanding your turf”.
• “Your Platform is like currency. It’s good to be able to print money”

Read Office
Strategy

• “Use the strongest, most broadly applicable aspect of your technology or business to seed the center of a new ecosystem.”

Read Office

• “…the field needs to be defined in a way that excludes most of them”

Read SharePoint – Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Processes and Business Intelligence

Positioning to Partners

• Invite partners “to joint in your little slice of heaven”
• Make sure “the risks of opposing it stay high”

Read ECM vendors pulling back from the ECM market to develop applications on top of SharePoint from fear of Microsoft.
Messaging

• “In a Platform Play you make comparisons to yourself.”

Read SharePoint version 2 a notoriously weak product
Finally

• “Platforms die when innovation dies”

This strategy can be summarized as using office dominance to expand into a new larger “uber” platform.
Wikipedia comments on previous platform expansion behaviour as follows:
“United States v. Microsoft 87 F. Supp. 2d 30 (D.D.C. 2000) was a court case filed against Microsoft Corporation on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty U.S. states. Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor. The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Microsoft Windows operating system. Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft’s victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of Internet Explorer. It was further alleged that this unfairly restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store. Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Internet Explorer over third party web browsers, Microsoft’s conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with OEM computer manufacturers, and Microsoft’s intent in its course of conduct.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

Interestingly though as the book states “Platforms die when innovation dies”. In the words of Microsoft “SharePoint is just like Office; it’s a bunch of point products gathered together into a suite.”?
Innovation or new “uber” packaging?
The real situation is one of choice. Do you want to be tied into Microsoft for the whole stack of:

• Operating System
• Database
• .NET
• Portal
• Browser
• Office
• Wiki
• Blog

What about your corporate infrastructure standards and user preferences?

• Operating System – Linux or Windows
• Database – My SQL or Oracle or DB2 or SQLServer
• .NET – Java or .NET
• Portal – LifeRay, JBoss Portal,
• Browser – Firefox or IE
• Office – OpenOffice or Office 2000, Office 2003 or Office 2007
• Wiki – MediaWiki other massively used wiki software
• Blog – WordPress or other massively used blog software

We are now moving to what Geoffrey Moore called “The Stack Wars” - Get a whole stack from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or SAP.
In summary is SharePoint the killer platform or the “Choice Killer” and “Corporate Standard Infrastructure Killer”.

Open Source is the alternative to being tied to a stack.

A year ago I wrote “Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing“. This generated a lot of positive feedback and was featured in “Enterprise Open Source Journal”
Alfresco is looking like it will be the fastest growing company I have been at. This made me review the rules and also think about a simple marketing model for open source. Marketing models are often dominated by position - Position in the technology adoption life cycle or Position relative to competitors. I have previously worked for companies focused on crossing the chasm in the early days and later being leaders. I have also worked for companies that were number 2 to a dominant player. The marketing models we used and the understanding of them was critical as it drove a coherent approach to:

• Segmentation
• Competition
• Differentiation
• Positioning
• Messaging

I have previously worked for:

• Ingres – Number 2 competitor to Oracle before they started dominating the market
• Documentum- Leader in Document Management
• SeeBeyond - Number 2 competitor to Tibco in Europe and number 3 in US

There are many approaches to marketing models – Moore with “Crossing the Chasm and Darwin and the Demo“, Ries and Trout with “Marketing Warfare” and ex Microsoft marketing people Zagula and Tong with the “Marketing Playbook”. Often you focus on your position in the market – a follower or a leader – the Avis vs. Hertz model or a gorilla, a chimp or a monkey model.

To make dramatic growth you need two things:

• A shift/discontinuity that shakes up a market – this may be legal, regulatory, technical …
• Customers who have a pain or are making a trade-off

A classic example of a trade-off is many people would like a fast, luxurious BMW but most would rather pay for a Toyota. In software terms it is common for users to have to choose between an expensive, hard-to-use ECM system with robustness, and performance or a low-cost collaboration portal that doesn’t meet their ECM requirements. This is a market that is ripe for commoditization and open source is the market shift to accelerate that commoditization. Martin Mickos of MySQL is famous for reputedly saying ” I want to make the the $10bn relational database market a $3bn market - and get a 30% share“. He also said “Business class is fine but economy gets me there at the same time and you don’t send all of your employees business class.” What is needed is a simple marketing model to capitalize on this situation.
Commoditization is taken for granted in many industries. We all drive commoditized cars. Commoditization is about:

• Efficiency of Development and Manufacturing
• Efficiency of Distribution
• Increased Quality – With high volumes things just have to work
• Reduced Cost

Open Source is made for these market conditions:

• Lower Cost of Software Development – Community, Best-of-Breed Open Source Components and world class engineers
• Low Cost Distribution Model – Internet and SourceForge
• Low Cost Of Sales – Model of Discover, Try and Buy with out a large costly sales-force
• High Quality – Large scale Community testing

This results in dramatically lower cost for the purchaser. The advantages that open source companies have are:

• The Internet, Blogs, RSS have levelled the playing field
• No Legacy
• Being able to start with a clean slate

So when these components are put into a marketing model you get the following. [We have used and field tested these ideas and I have used Enterprise Content Management as an example]:

Situation

Users are looking to rollout ECM to all desktops but have to choose between an expensive, hard-to-use ECM system with the robustness and performance you need or a low-cost collaboration portal that doesn’t meet ECM requirements and the alternatives don’t integrate. There is a resultant very low adoption of ECM – estimated to be 5% to 10% of users

Segmentation – Why Choose

What users want is a low cost, simple to install system that is easy to use and scale-out. It should be simple to develop content centric applications and fit in with a corporate architecture The target is all users who manage content and want a scalable, robust system – “Why Choose”. This is the massive under-served segment between the high-end ECM systems and at the low-end SharePoint. Often these users store content in a shared drive today and use email for collaboration. These are the tools of mass usage.

The segment becomes even more attractive when the focus has been in acquisition and integration as opposed to innovation. This is common as a post bubble strategy was to buy companies to fill out the portfolio at bargain prices.

The segment becomes even more attractive if standards are emerging.

Model Rule One Segmentation: Choose a segment with a large under-served mass between the high-end and the low-end. A lack of innovation in the segment makes it even more attractive. Emerging standards as well make the segment irresistable

Competition

Your competition are the high-priced legacy vendors that are effectively on their way to becoming boutiques. You need to become the brand for the masses with a high-end cachet.
High-End: Content Stack Players

Low-End: SharePoint

Model Rule Two Competition: Your competitors are primarily the high-priced enterprise vendors (and to a lesser extent the low price alternatives) not other open source vendors
Differentiation

This is critical as it has to be simple to explain and indisputable. It is critical to attack “the weakness in their strength” - classic Ries and Trout marketing warfare. An example is:

Differentiation/Comparison Content Stack SharePoint Alfresco

Low-Cost/Easy-to-Use_______N_______________Y________Y

Scalable Robust_____________Y_______________N________Y

Open Choice:______________N_______________N_______Y
OS, App Server,

Java vs. .NET, Portal
Model Rule Three Differentiation: Differentiate on high-end features at a price that people can afford. This is packaged as a simple to install, simple to use and simple to scale-out system. This also fits in with the existing corporate standards lowering TCO.

Positioning

You are entitling people to what they were previously denied. They no longer have to make a trade-off.

The Open Source alternative for Enterprise Content Management Model

Model Rule Four Positioning: Keep the positioning simply. We are the open source alternative for (generic term for expensive proprietary vendor)

Messaging

This should complement your positioning as offering the high-end functionality that users require at a price that they can afford and drive people to try your offering. This is much more campaign oriented.

• By the makers of Documentum® and Interwoven®
• When you are looking to rollout ECM to everyone you don’t have to break the bank
• If you know Content you know Alfresco - Content Wanted

Test Drive Alfresco today

Model Rule Five Messaging: This should say high-end functionality (without stating it explicitly) at a price users can afford and drive people to try your offering

Proof Points

All of this should be backed up by indisputable facts.

• Architecture – Choice of Operating system, RDBMS, Java vs. .NET, Portal, Office suite, Browser
• Scalable, Robust – JSR-170 Benchmark
• Low-Cost, Easy-to-Use – Customer Testimonials

Model Rule Six Indisputable Facts: Have a proof point for each of your key differentiators to make buyers feel comfortable to make a decision to try and buy your offering.

Alfresco is composed of senior executive from very successful traditional enterprise software companies such as Documentum, Business Objects and Interwoven who joined in the belief that open source is the future of software. Geoffrey Moore pioneered marketing for high-tech disruption in the 1990’s and then ten years later talked about marketing and business model discontinuity in Darwin and the Demon. In the 1990’s many enterprise software companies adopted basically the same fundamental marketing models. Open source is a significant change where different successful companies have become successful in differentiate ways. The understanding of open source is accelerating by the month as are marketing models, marketing execution rules and licensing. Hopefully this will stimulate some thought. Open source has to have a different approach to the massive gorilla software companies of today. It can’t use its dominant position to force its platform. There is a better way.

I’ll explore alternative models for different types of companies later.

This week BBC Radio had a feature where the Conservative Party promised to create a level playing field for open source software in the UK in an attempt to save taxpayers more than £600m ($1.15bn) a year. George Osborne, told the Royal Society of Arts “There isn’t a level playing field for open source software. As it stands, too many companies are frozen out of government IT contracts, stifling competition and driving up costs. He also announced that Mark Thompson has been advised on how to make Britain the open source leader in Europe.

The current labour government has come in for criticism for failing to promote open software, most recently in the education sectors where the British Education Communications and Technology Agency extended and agreement with Microsoft despite concerns over the software giant’s licensing and research indicating schools could save money by using open source alternatives.

As Steve Ballmer said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”

John Newton in his blog commented, “Being a British software company, you would think that the UK government would be all over Alfresco as an open source alternative to American software. After all, governments all over Europe are adopting Alfresco for document management, records management and starting to develop web sites. Local and Central governments in France and Spain have been using Alfresco for nearly two years now.”

In this radio feature Microsoft were invited to respond. What was amazing was their comment that Microsoft gave customers “choice”
So when you choose SharePoint where is the choice around:

• Operating System
• Database
• Application Server
• Java or .NET
• Content Management System
• Portal
• Blog Software
• Wiki

In a book entitled ” the Marketing Playbook” ex Microsoft marketing executives talk of Microsoft strategies and tactics and this is a classic platform expansion play (from Office) as opposed to a “choice” strategy. So this is how they kill the “cancer” with “Choice”!

More on the marketing plays next week

There is a famous film called “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” where the film begins as the occupants of four vehicles on a narrow road in a southern California desert stop to help Smiler Grogan, a man who has just careered off the highway. With his dying breaths, he tells bystanders about $350,000 hidden in the fictional town of Santa Rosita, A wild race follows to find the treasure. There was a recent study by Accenture that reminded me of this film where in this case the chase was for content not money.

The study highlights:

• Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
• More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
• 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
• 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable
• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
• 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
• 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information
• 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data
• Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal

When you look at these statistics it may seem like a “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” but in reality it is a “Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous Content World”!

Content Management and Search is critical for people’s productivity

• Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
• 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data

Content Control and Records Management is critical to people’s productivity. Content that is not approved should not be available to everyone. Security should be applied to search so that users only get access to content that are are supposed to view. Out-of-date, incorrect and invalid content needs to be marked and retired.

• More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
• 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
• 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable

The web is not one website and corporate content is not one repository - It’s a Distributed Content World

• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
• 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
• 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information

It’s a Federated World. To analyze a competitor you need to search across internal repositories and external repositories. These may be content management systems, blogs, wikis - It’s a Heterogeneous World

• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get

The consumer interface is coming into the corporation. Interestingly 31% said it was hard to get competitor information vs. 45% for other parts of the company. It is easier to search the web and get useful information on a competitor that search an internal repository and also users don’t want to use their internal portal. Users want the simplicity of the web interfaces across internal and external content

• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
• Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal

It’s a Standards, Standards, Standards, Standards World

Given this scenario the only option is to use standards to search across these repositories. In the old proprietary, legacy content world distributed meant going across a couple of that vendors repositories and maybe another competitors repository. In this scenario creating adaptors in feasible. In the consumer driven, distributed, federated, heterogeneous world of today the options are endless and not under a companies control. Writing hundred of adaptors is not an option.

That is why is this world OpenSearch against content repositories is the solution today. OpenSearch is the standard used by:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• eBay
• Wikipedia
• Technorati
• Creative Commons
• and many more

Alfresco version 2.0 has adopted OpenSearch as a search standard.

David Caruana has written an excellent blog on Alfresco OpenSearch.

John Newton has also written an excellent blog on Open Search.
Alfresco 2.0 can be downloaded at

http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/

and read about in the Wiki at

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/OpenSearch

Last week I was writing my presentation for the upcoming joint seminar with Unisys focusing on the commoditization of ECM and it reminded me of a book and phrase “Barbarians at the Gate”. I worked in enterprise software for 20 year and still have many friends there. A thing that is often said is “The problem with open source is it is 10 times cheaper than enterprise software so you have to do 10 times as many deals”. The key thing here is commoditization is happenning and the commoditization is happenning at the software, business model and marketing levels. The net effect is that the large enterprise deals are going away and the sales process is being commoditized. What is key now is to have a business model that is efficient in this new world.

Geoffrey Moore was always my marketing hero and in “The Gorilla Game” (1998) he makes some points that are particularly applicable today and to working in “Open Source Time”. Moore talks about the differences between “Applications and Enabling Technologies” (page 65) and says:

“The plug-in structure of layered technology, makes it critical for standards to emerge in the enabling technology layers, but it is not as critical for this same process to occur in the application layers.” Applications “do not commoditize easily and thus cannot proliferate as broadly or interoperate with other systems as intimately. As such these vendors have networks effects only with entities immediately adjacent to their market space … By contrast enabling technologies commoditize extremely well, allowing them to proliferate into markets far afield from the original starting points and generate a high degree of network effects. These in turn put pressure on the overall marketplace to standardize exclusively on a single set of components driving market shares to extraordinary levels …”

Open source is key driver of commoditization and a modern example of the network effect. These principles explain why many of the leading open source companies are infrastructure companies - they can be commoditized more easily and benefit more from the network effect - MySQL, Red Hat, JBoss. Traditional enterprise markets tended to follow a pattern of moving from hundreds of companies in a space, to a pack e.g. Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase to a gorilla emerging form the pack - Oracle. In open source the network effect and commoditization happens much more rapidly - in open source time. That is why in many open source categories there is very quickly one clear leader.

Alfresco has benefited from these principles, being infrastructure software in a commoditizing market with a massive network effect. That is what has made it the clear leader in its segment in just over a year. GPL just accelerates the commoditizaion and network effect. We feel strongly that open source is the future of software. There is a phrase that you can’t be “half-pregnant” and similarly you can’t be half open source and half proprietary. It is open source, not hybrid models that will drive true disruption, commoditization and benefit most from the network effect. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the ideal license to drive forward this industry disruption and accelerate the network effect. That is what drove us to move to GPL.

The acceleration of the network effect is happening. Friday saw us have 3 times the traffic we have ever had on our website and we have had more enquiries about Alfresco than ever before. Open source works and GPL just accelerates the network effect.

Here, Gian Trotta, ebizQ’s product manager interviews me on various topics such as:

Here, Dan Keldsen who is a Senior Analyst, Consultant, as well as the Chief Technology Officer with the Delphi Group interviews me on various topics such as:

• Mindmapping, how I use it in everyday work, life and marketing
• Open-source versus closed solutions
• David vs. Goliath
• Crossing the Chasm
• and several other topics

http://delphigroup.blogs.com/dan_keldsen/2006/12/think_before_yo.html

Dan is a very knowledgeable person and great to talk with

Enjoy

ian

There has been a lot of interest and feedback since I originally wrote in my Blog Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing. What I am going to do now is expand on what I originally wrote looking at each rule in more depth. Rules are of little use unless they have context and context is a model. The model is important as it determines behaviour and the relevance of the rules which change at different points in a products lifecycle. In the late 80s and 90s there were great technological advances with some companies succeeding and some failing. Geoffrey Moore created a Technology Adoption LifeCycle (TALC) model to explain this. This was also the basis to create a strategy - where everyone dreams of hitting the Tornado. Here I will discuss the model that Moore created in the early 90s that we followed at Documentum

• Early Market Discontinuous Innovation. Attractive to technology enthusiasts and visionaries.

At Documentum we created an objectrelational model and built a document model on top of this using a three-tier architecture.

• Chasm A pause of market interest when there is no natural customer group.

Documentum quickly had a number of large customers from pharmaceutical, insurance, aerospace segments. Documentum crossed the chasm by focussing on New Drug Application (NDA) process in the research part of the pharmaceutical industry.

• Bowling Alley Adoption by a specific customer segment for a specific problem. Attractive to pragmatists due to specific benefits not available with current technology.

The adoption of Documentum was incredibly rapid, with 38 of the top 40 pharmaceutical companies standardizing on Documentum in just over 18 months. It is now written about as a classic marketing execution of the TALC model and is taught at the Harvard Business School. The alley is about self-referencing - driving the same application to a different industry or a different application to the same industry. Documentum expanded into pharmaceutical manufacturing using a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) application (different application/same company). Self reference to a different industry is about recognizing the same technology for a different problem. An NDA is a structured, very large, document that has rules for submissions to different regions (rules driven virtual document). An Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives contract in investment banking is a structured document with more complex rules for different financial, geographic and legal situations. Documentum evolved its rule-based virtual document technology to manage investment banking documents. Later this became the largest market for Documentum. Documentum also expanded into the engineering construction companies that built the pharmaceutical plants

• Tornado Hypergrowth. Remaining pragmatists adopt on mass choosing the market leader as a new infrastructure

• Main Street Conservative Buyers who choose, not for competitive advantage, but not to get left behind

There is a good presentation on the web, from the Chasm Group, that discusses this model and relates it to eLearning. This is available at:

http://www.elearningforum.com/meetings/2000/november/chasm2.pdf

Later I will review Moores thoughts from almost 10 years later that he previewed in an article called Darwin and the Demon and discuss what is most appropriate for an Open Source Marketing Model.

I spent a week at Boston at LinuxWorld and it made me think about a number of rules I had written

Rule 5 - There was a genuine parallel universe of products at the show

But more specifically Rule 6. Users have a new discovery and acquisition process.

What brought this home was that the show was quiet and previously we had done a joint webinar with MySQL and had 290 people registered and 129 attending. Open Source people are technically savvy and use these new mediums more. In that spirit we rolled out 2 Podcasts. The first was with our Co-Founder John Newton talking about Alfresco today and in the future. The second Podcast was with Kevin Cochrane discussing Web Content Management and Alfresco’s plans. Go to iTunes Podcasts and search for open source and you will see Alfresco top of the list.

This brings in Rule 3 in that the cost of the infrastructure to deliver trust based marketing is there and is very low-cost. At a show, the larger companies can have large, big budget stands dwarfing the new open source companies. In the new world, the medium doesn’t distinguish big from small and Alfresco is ahead of the major billion dollar proprietary companies. These new mediums are tailored for modern open source companies which also brings in Rule 2. The strength of large companies is their size and budget. But therein lays a weakness - their bureaucracy.

This week I’ll review some other overall core principles on stages in the market and where open source is. Then we’ll dive into the rules in more detail.