What if being an open source startup is a weakness?

If you are an open source groupie, you maintain an open source project or two and have contributed and used open source throughout your career, it’s easy to think that open source is universally loved.

But when I interviewed Open Source Program Office leaders for a report for the Linux Foundation, many of them mentioned that among their companies’ engineers, not everyone loved open source. In particular, there were engineers who had had a negative experience with open source at some point in their career, and as a result do not see open source software as more desirable than proprietary software. Sometimes it was just a neutral feeling, but some engineers would actively avoid open source software.

I doubt this means they completely avoided using any open source software at all — I’m not sure if that’s possible. But they probably are wary of open source software, especially if it’s complex and critical.

This is why, in your positioning and messaging, it’s a good idea to focus not on the fact that you’re open source, but rather the value that being open source provides for your users. You don’t know what someone thinks when they hear ‘open source.’ It could be that they hear ‘transparent, extensible, secure.’ It could also be that they hear ‘impossible to get support, bad user experience, spotty maintenance.’ Or they could just shrug, because they don’t care one way or the other if you’re open source — perhaps because all your competitors are too.

Focusing on the value your users get from the fact that you’re open source also means that you can control the narrative more. If your users hear open source and think “transparency!” but you actually want them to hear “extensibility,” that’s a messaging fail, even if both things are positive. But focusing on value is even more critical when you remember that some people will hear open source and their assumptions about what that means will not be positive.