Bad positioning hurts the whole open source ecosystem

When we talk about positioning, it’s often through the lens of how better positioning will help a commercial entity make more money. This makes sense… positioning is a marketing concept and most people who write books about it or think about it do so in the context of trying to help a company improve profits. But positioning principles can (and should) be applied to anything, from a book club to a block party. And that definitely includes open source projects whether or not there is any direct link between the project’s success and profit.

Of course, better positioning benefits maintainers — they want more people to use their projects, better positioning helps them achieve that. But it’s less obvious how better positioning can help the entire open source ecosystem — if a higher percentage of projects were positioned well. And yet, bad positioning is horrible for the open source ecosystem.

As a result of the many projects that don’t effectively communicate what they do and who should (and should not) use the project, it takes longer for an average user to find a project that will give them the outcome they want. It also means users can easily end up using a project that isn’t as well suited to their needs as another option, simply because they didn’t know the other option existed. Because poor positioning makes it harder to find a project that meets your needs, it makes it more likely that duplicate projects will run in parallel, ultimately making both weaker. It also dilutes the focus of the communities supporting each project — if no one is 100% clear on what the project’s mission is, it’s harder to herd all the cats who might want to contribute to the project in some way.

Poor positioning is something the open source community should care about, not just because an individual project is more successful when it’s positioned well, but because the open source community is stronger when more projects are positioned well.