Positioning your FOSS is the foundation for positioning your COSS

In most (but not all) cases, an open source company’s trajectory looks something like:

Step one: create open source project

Step two: have open source project take off

Step three: figure out how to make money from the open source project

Most COSS companies’ first positioning challenge will be positioning their pure FOSS, because the FOSS will exist before a commercial product does.

The open source project is the foundation on which the company is built — in fact, even if the open source project came after the commercial product, open source is almost always a foundation, in the sense that you have much wider adoption of the open source project than of the commercial product.

So positioning your open source project well is the foundation of positioning your company and your product well. That’s why I wrote an ebook about positioning open source projects before tackling a book about positioning for commercial open source companies.

If you’re struggling to position your open source project, check out the ebook — whether you’ve gotten to the point of introducing a commercial product or not.