[Marketing] just some thoughts

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Okay, so I'm likely talking to the wrong people out there :-(

I just hate to see us have to spend time/money selling the general open source idea, when there are other groups out there are already doing that (and likely way better than we could).

-mpg


-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Montesinos [mailto:mmontesinos at prodevelop.es] 
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 10:14 AM
To: Michael P. Gerlek; OSGeo Marketing
Subject: RE: [Marketing] just some thoughts

> This surprises/disappoints me.  Amongst the developer or technical decision
> maker crowd, are there really still people who in don't grok at least the
> overarching idea of open source?

Lots of them! Otherwise everybody would have massively come out from the dark-side and joined the open-source ;-)

Of course anybody knows about open source, but a strategic decission towards it is another question. And for these kind of decissions, I usually need to convince customers about the stability, quality, sustainability and many others -ity, regarding general open source and specific OSGeo projects.

Regards,

Miguel


> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: Michael P. Gerlek [mailto:mpg at lizardtech.com]
> Enviado el: jueves, 11 de diciembre de 2008 18:23
> Para: Miguel Montesinos; OSGeo Marketing
> Asunto: RE: [Marketing] just some thoughts
> 
> Miguel escribió:
> 
> > I usually come up against explaining both Open Source and FOSS4G. If we
> > don't give some guidelines about open source, it may stop some CTOs from
> > going to open source, and it makes impossible therefore to adopt FOSS4G
> > projects.
> 
> This surprises/disappoints me.  Amongst the developer or technical decision
> maker crowd, are there really still people who in don't grok at least the
> overarching idea of open source?
> 
> The people I meet may not know the geo world has such strong FOSS
> offerings, and they may not be able to articulate the differences between
> GPL and BSD licenses, but they definitely understand the general idea.
> 
> -mpg