Positioning FOSS

If you care about growing your free open source software, you should care about how it’s positioned.

—> Not everyone cares about stuff like growing a user base, building a healthy community and having people actually using their project after they download it. That’s cool — one of the beauties of open source is that there’s a pretty large menu of why you might want to create an open source project, and growth does not always matter. However, if you do want growth, positioning is really important.

Good news! I wrote an ebook about positioning free open source software. Unlike a lot of my writing, the focus of the ebook is on free open source projects, and only on the free software. I don’t get into relating an open source project and related commercial product(s), or how to position your company. This is just about free software.

Positioning a free open source software, even completely on its own, has a couple subtle differences from positioning a commercial product. Specifically:

  • You’ll have way less information about user behavior and what users compare you to unless you proactively go out an ask them

  • Your technical decisions can matter, particularly when it comes to articulating points of view, in a way that they don’t if we’re talking about a closed source product

  • The first step is to figure out what your growth goals are, because unlike in a commercial context where profit is the obvious goal, there can be lots of valid growth goals for a project and you need to understand that first, before settling on a positioning strategy.

Anyway, the full ebook is pretty meaty, so if you’re interested in positioning and open source startups, check it out. And if you know anyone with an open source project they’d like to have grow, or have grow more, then send it to them.

Emily Omier