Keynote speakers such as Larry Augustin (CEO SugarCRM, Angel Investor) and Dirk Riehle (Germany’s first professor of Open Source Software) have already been announced. There are some more who have just confirmed their attendance, but I am not allowed to name them yet (surprise, surprise).

The committee has invested a lot of time pro-bono in directly contacting OSS projects and speakers and in evaluating talk proposals. Our goal was to make sure the program will feature some of the key projects and persons, providing a mix of introductory as well as advanced topics, technical as well as business-related talks. I am sure you will appreciate the program once it has been published at www.linuxtag.org within the next couple of days.

Kudos to my fellows at the program committee and thanks for bringing me in, it’s just so much fun! Many thanks also to everyone who proposed a talk!

Entrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie’s 25 year career in technology marketing. She has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP.

She is furthermore a professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

Read more about Annie on the Initmarkteing team page.

Bienvenue Annie!

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an opportunity for Open Source?
• More real-life case studies on how OSS is being used in mission-critical scenarios.
• A European or global perspective on Open Source in Public Administration.
• How to make use of Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine with Open Source apps?
• Technical tutorials for beginners, especially for building Web apps (e.g. PHP/Ruby/Java/etc. for beginners).
• High performance Web environments with Open Source tools
• Security in the Cloud
• What’s the status of some of the regional Linux distributions?

I can’t promise that your talk will be accepted if it covered one of the above topics. The review process is of course a joint effort of the whole Program Committee. Anyway, it’s definitely worth a try. Of course, any other topic I did not think of is also highly welcome.

Go here to submit your LinuxTag proposal.

For example, an Open Source business started in Spain will naturally feel more comfortable with doing sales in Spain with most employees speaking and thinking in Spanish. Spain is where our sample company comes from, it’s a safe haven, and it’s where the bulk of sales are being made. Why should they go global, invest in building an international business and take the risk?

Sooner or later, there will be global competition in the same niche from another Open Source vendor or project. Someone else will reach a critical mass of international community and business adoption much quicker than the Spanish company will ever be able within its country of origin. And then our sample vendor will find itself against a much stronger competitor who isn’t afraid to take risks.

Essentially, Open Source vendors must think of themselves as global and look at regions as regions, and not the other way round.

In order to do this well, English should be the main language of communication with the public right from the start. Make sure all general marketing collateral is first available in English. This will make English and an international point of view part of the company’s DNA from the beginning, which is critical for success.

Independently, it is of course important to note that in some regions you will only be able to attract early adopters by communicating in English. Pragmatist buyers in countries such as France or Germany will appreciate if your sales stuff spoke French or German and related marketing collateral were available in their native language. This trend of early adopters willing to try out English-only products while mainstream users wait for the product to mature, allows for easy and free market research. If the early adopters in a region start using and talking about your project and you were able to win a few prestigious customers, it is time to consider localizing there.

So, don’t make this mistake, thinking like a regional Open Source vendor that goes global. Rather think like an international company focusing its sales efforts towards certain regions.

Looking at this from another perspective, I never understood discussions whether MySQL (for example) is a European or US company? Trying to link banner Open Source vendors with national or regional pride is totally neglecting the fact that Open Source is and always has been a global business.

There are two different sets of questions, depending on your background:

• IT Executives of CMS Vendors
• IT Executives of CMS End User Companies

Thanks for participating in the survey and please spread the word!

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.

Unfortunately, we began to realize that Launchpad isn’t designed or intended to be used as a self-hosting site due to the following reasons:

• There are no release packages. You checkout the development code via a Bazaar repository and then compile it. Depending on the state of the last checkin, the code might even not compile sometimes. It took us two tries to get the installation done.
• The working installation is meant for local use only and it’s not trivial to get it running under a normal, fully-qualified domain name.
• Even if we had figured out how to make Launchpad serve properly via HTTP to the general public, we would have faced a maintenance nightmare by doing QA and release management ourselves.
• Let’s not forget the fact that Canonical requires you to not use the trademark “Launchpad” and to replace all the graphic icons.

It is not without irony that an Open Source marketing agency was blinded by the fuzzy PR parlance of Canonical. Luckily, the source code always tells the truth.

After we had discussed the issue on the launchpad-dev mailing list, Canonical today added the following line to the Launchpad Development Wiki, which makes it pretty clear:

Note that our focus is on getting Launchpad to build easily so more people can participate in Launchpad development. Running a stable production instance would be ”much” harder than running a single-developer test instance, and we don’t recommend it. Unlike many open source projects, we’re not seeking to maximize the number of installations; our goal is to improve the instance we’re already running at Launchpad.net.

Obviously, Canonical really doesn’t have to worry that by open sourcing Launchpad, they licensed away their business model.

Our client has opted for FusionForge. It’s a great alternative, works out of the box, is easy to install and includes all the basic features. It runs on top of Ubuntu 9.04, an Open Source operating system backed by Canonical, which, ironically, has some proper release management

People seem to think they have a right to free software and free support. It is not about free speech. It’s all about free beer!

I don’t think this blanket judgment is true. There have always been freeriders in Open Source communities, but the overall benefits of an Open Source community to an Open Source business always outweigh the community loss imposed by freeriders.

Here are the top commercial reasons why Open Source software vendors should invest in community development:

1. Better sales lead generation: A growing Open Source community translates into a growing sales pipeline if done well, i.e. OSS vendors can monetize a part of the community user base and convert them to commercial users.
2. More effective sales: Community-driven sales requires less effort compared to a direct sales approach, because potential buyers have already evaluated the Open Source product and contact sales only when they are ready for a purchase.
3. Raise visibility: A vibrant Open Source community fosters branding and word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Build a Brand Community: Open Source brands grow and thrive around real value created by a community of engaged, informed participants. A healthy community adds tremendous value to almost any activity a company engages in.
5. Larger install base: The goal is to build the corporate brand as well as product and service quality by creating a larger install base.
6. Cost-effective marketing: The larger and the more active an Open Source community, the more it helps to spread the word and the less investment in marketing is needed to achieve the same level of visibility.
7. Higher credibility: A growing Open Source community helps companies to be perceived as a true Open Source vendor by journalists, analysts and potential customers. A critical mass of community members also indicates how well a product solves a problem and that there is actual demand.
8. Cost-efficient and competitive business: Commercial Open Source offers the best cost-benefit ratio for enterprise customers due to cost savings, innovation and investment protection enabled by a vivid Open Source ecosystem that contributes bug fixes, new features and more.
9. Investment protection: Reduce client risk by broadening the base of product-related skills.
10. Test and develop new markets: Open Source offers companies and organizations a highly cost-effective route into international markets. Through community development tactics, OSS vendors can test and develop new markets and communities with little upfront investment.
11. Externalize 1st Level Support: Enable community to help themselves share information, to reduce support burden for the OSS vendor on basic issues.
12. Technology and thought leadership: Community development will help to establish an OSS product as a technology leader in the space by attracting external developers. Based on that, OSS vendors can through appropriate communications also become a thought leader.

IKS is an EU-funded project with an overall budget of 8.5 million Euros. The first workshop back in May saw two dozen of bright Open Source CMS minds discussing a semantic stack in general. This time, it will also make sense for non-CMS-related Open Source projects and vendors to join.

There will be interesting presentations from some key figures at the second workshop in Rome, such as Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research talking about “The Role of Semantics in Search”.

If you’re up to joining the Open Source Web 3.0 train, then hurry up, because the October 22nd deadline for registering for the 2nd IKS workshop on semantic search is approaching quickly. See you there!

As you might expect, let me take a look at it from the marketing perspective.

What I see in markets where plenty of open source offerings exist with a multitude of business models (e.g. in the CMS space), is that there is growing pressure on vendor-driven models to adopt more of the benefits of the community-driven model and vice versa.

There are various business tools that allow OSS vendors and their investors to test how much they will actually benefit from gradually moving control to the community. Switching to a more permissive license might be the last step.

For example, OSS vendors can increasingly include community members in discussing and executing the marketing strategy. Furthermore, a vendor could initialize a community board where the vendor discusses release cycles and development issues with community members. Both efforts could later lead towards a community-owned association that holds the trademark and decides upon the development roadmap.

On the other hand, community-driven OSS projects sometimes envy OSS vendors, especially when it comes to the ability of rolling out a focused marketing. I’ve heard from a hand full of board members of OSS associations that they’d love to a) actually have a marketing budget and b) have control over that budget without the need for lengthy discussions to reach consensus among the community. Things might perhaps be moving towards some light vendor-style structures here, given that OSS projects need to increasingly compete with OSS vendors. In the end, it’s all about OSS projects becoming more professional.