Why positioning matters for open source software

Positioning is important whether you are trying to build a community of people who pay you money or trying to build a community of people who will pay you with their time (ie contribute to your open source project).

There are both similarities and differences in the positioning process, depending on if you’re positioning a closed source or open source software. But positioning is important in both cases.

The similarities

When positioning an open source project, your goal is exactly the same as when positioning a commercial product. You want to choose the best market category for your OSS and identify the characteristics of people who will get the most value out of your project.

The market category creates the right set of assumptions around your project, and could be the same for OSS and closed source solutions. Chances are there are closed source ‘competitors’ of your OSS. You could have a time series database that is open source or one that is closed source. You could have a continous integration platform that is closed source or open source.

We don’t generally use words like “market” in reference to open source projects, but this is more of a vocabulary issue than a true difference. You still have to narrow down the types of individuals and organizations that will get the most value out of your project.

Some differences

So what are the differences in positioning an open source software versus a closed source one? It’s not so much a differences in the results — those are essentially the same. There are some differences in the process, however, as well as in what to do after the positioning exercise.

First of all, there won’t be salespeople in an open source community — though there might be community managers who have a similar role. In fact, many of the differences between positioning an OSS versus a closed source software come down to vocabulary. You have contributors, not customers. Someone is presumably paying attention to your community and interacts with your contributors (who are, after all, generally your best-fit users). Those people are like the salespeople and customer support teams in a closed source software environment, because they should both know who the ideal contributors are as well as how they use the software.

Nonetheless, in an open source context it’s usually even more important to do interviews as part of the positioning process, so you can get an understanding of the evaluation process that happened before a particular user joined the community for the first time. Because most of the involvement of community managers happens after, rather than before, that initial commitment, it’s important to understand from the user’s point of view why they chose one project over another.

Positioning is at least as important for open source projects as it is for closed source projects — and perhaps more so, precisely because there isn’t an interaction before the initial decision that could clear up confusion about the software or communicate the value it provides if that’s not clear from the initial README description.