When you look who is pioneering innovative new marketing approaches and technologies you will often find Open Source companies being on top of the list. That’s not by accident. Open Source companies have much less budget to promote their products compared to their traditional commercial competitors. So they are forced spend the money wiser and come up with new and better ideas. If you look for example at the reference lists of marketing automation SaaS platforms such as Marketo, Market2Lead, Silverpop, Loopfuse or Eloqua you will find many Open Source company on these. Sadly enough there’s no really usable open source technology out there to do marketing automation despite the fact that some of the mentioned SaaS players do actually use Open Source technologies to quite some extent. But that’s maybe a niche to be filled by somebody? Anyway, Open Source companies are not only leading when it’s about applying marketing automation but also along other modern techniques such as content syndication, leveraging SlideShare, YouTube, Twitter or social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. So if you are looking for good ideas on how to do marketing, many Enterprise may be well advised to look at how Open Source companies do these things.(Comment: For our German language visitors interested in innovative web marketing techniques and approaches there’s a good introduction white paper available. For the English speaking audience the SaaS vendors mentioned above do provide good information)

Enterprises are quite worried about Open Source license models and potential legal issues. I have been talking to companies that claimed to not use any GPL type software because of the viral nature of the license. Others have decided to install complex processes to make sure that every license is understood and all consequences checked. Do Enterprises bother too much here? Many probably could take it a bit easier given that most use is really use, very few companies actually alter the software they download. And even if they did, it still wouldn’t be an issue as long as the software is not redistributed. There may be situations in international companies with many subsidiaries and legal entities, where “distribution” could become an issue even inside the enterprise, but this occasions are rare and shouldn’t be the reason for banning GPL. Many companies are also afraid to publish software (or software changes) because of the potential liability claims, but there are ways around this too. So, if your Enterprise doesn’t use Open Source for purely legal issues, it may be right to ask a second (or third) time before giving in.

SourceForge is acquiring Ohloh. Two of the largest and most prominent Open Source directories go together. That’s good and bad, as always. Ohloh has followed many innovative paths to generate interesting data and information around open source projects. They picked Ruby on Rails as their programming environment and probably were one of the show cases for Ruby with this. They had open APIs very early. I liked what they were doing a lot. SourceForge on the other side is sort of the father of all Open Source directories. They were very early and probably the most complete directory of them all. Bringing the two together could be an opportunity but also a bit of a threat, especially to Ohloh. Will they be able to continue to innovate? We will see.For EOS Directory this recent acquisition doesn’t really mean a big change. While both SourceForge and Ohloh tried to cover pretty much the whole space of Open Source EOS is very focused on the most enterprise ready technologies and on the Enterprise user.

The Economist has posted yesterday that “open source software has won the argument“.Others, for example Matthew Aslett expanded on this thought and asked additional questions, i.e. where to go from here.In my eyes this is not really about war and winning, it’s more about finding a well thought through co-existence of proprietary and Open Source software. It’s about industrializing software production, i.e. making the development process more effective and efficient. And it’s about broadening access to good software for everybody. There are good reasons for inventors and clever engineers to publish their work as proprietary software and generating some return for their hard work. And there are good reasons for opening commodity technologies and for leveraging the distribution power of the Open Source approach. I always stated that the future will bring co-existence of both worlds and this seems where we are heading too. Good for us.One caveat though: As it has recently been discussed there is still often no fair competition between commercial vendors and Open Source solutions. The case of Switzerland where a big Microsoft deal was closed without even looking at (Open Source) alternatives is an example. So, maybe the “war” is still not won?

Enterprises are used to purchase software following a standardized procurement process. This process is supported by commercial vendors by supplying information, answering RFPs, sending materials, providing free support, delivering proof-of-concepts. etc. When an Enterprise turns to Open Source, many of these things are not granted anymore, especially when you are dealing with community supported software. The illustration below compares a typical Open Source community, a commercial Open Source vendor and a traditional commercial software vendor along the services typically requested by enterprise.

What can be easily seen is that Enterprises must change their attitude a lot if they really want to deal with true Open Source communities. As not all of the Enterprises are willing to do so, an interesting market for “commercial Open Source” vendors has been enabled. These commercial Open Source vendors such as SugarCRM, Alfresco, SpringSource, etc. close the gap between what a traditional commercial vendor is offering and what a community is able to do. It comes with a price of course, but still is very attractive, especially when Open Source elements and commercial elements are combined in a good way.