LCA2009: Publicising a FOSS project

Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 January 2009 12:20

Opinion and Analysis

The challenges one faced in promotion were to introduce and educate, bring about adoption and then ensure that those who did adopt stayed true and began to contribute themselves.

Brockmeier advised people not to talk about the negatives of the competition, but rather to focus on the positives of one's own software. "Talk about benefits, not features," was his message.

Projects should ensure that working releases were made early and often and they should understand what their target audience was; surveys and user profiles could be used to understand users' likes and dislikes, he said.

But when it came to promotion tools, Brockmeier showed that his knowledge was shallow at best. He advised people to send well-drafted press releases to journalists; provide review guides for software; cultivate the media to ensure good coverage; and create one's own publicity in the form of blogs.

I'm not sure how many professional journalists would like to receive Brockmeier's press releases or whether anybody of such persuasion would accept, without a kilo of salt, material in a blog that a project writes about itself.

But then, that's Joe's take on getting publicity. He forgot to mention that one of the reasons his employer, Novell, really needs some good publicity is because it sullied its image by signing a patent deal with Microsoft in 2006.

Let's hope FOSS projects don't take him seriously - else the gains that have been made in the last few years would be lost overnight.