This is the second part of my two-part series on open source market strategies and implementations. I previously outlined the 10 strategy rules for open source marketing and emphasized building new markets, differentiating, contributing, pricing and innovating, and the customer relationship. As I mentioned in part one, a year ago I wrote 'Howells' 10 Rules for Open Source Marketing.' Here we're looking at where Alfresco is a year later in its marketing approach.

A year ago I wrote 'Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing.' At Alfresco we believed that open source was different and needed a different marketing model. Geoffrey Moore was at the root of our thinking when he wrote about 'Darwin and the Demon' and markets being ripe for disruption in the form of marketing and business model disruption. We saw that there was no 'cookie cutter,' standard approach and tried to blend our experience in growing large successful enterprise software companies with some best principles from marketing visionaries such as Geoffrey Moore, who had a massive influence on all of us from Documentum.

There's been a lot of pubic discussion recently about what it means to be open. While the OSI has published the Open Source Definition, which lists 10 attributes of what it means to be 'open source,' commercial entities have emerged that are described as 'hybrid' models. Many companies offer a version of a product that's sold under an OSI-approved license and another version under a commercial license. Others sell and support products that meet some but not all of the 10 attributes. These companies purport to be 'open' without meeting this strict definition, leading to a spirited debate about what it means to be open in an evolving market.

I was lucky enough to be Documentum's first employee in Europe in 1993. While there, I worked closely with Geoffrey Moore and got 'religion' about understanding not just the so-called 'chasm' but the whole marketing model and its implications for strategy, marketing, product, and operational behaviour. I started working with John Newton in the late '80s and we recently discussed marketing models and their relevance to Open Source as well as Geoffrey Moore's new thinking in Darwin and the Demon. This conversation was the root of my thoughts on rules for Open Source marketing - new model, new rules (and some old ones).