Open Source as a Marketing Tool & R+D Costs Cutting Tool

The Open Source Initiative keyhole. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Open Source has always been considered as a way to share software code and components, therefore providing others the ability to get their hands on "your code" and making extension, improving bugs etc.
There is a similar trend called PCB Design Reuse, and both are basically applying engineering principles of reusing components in practice.
Companies like Google use an open source infrastructure (servers, java software on android, python on web apps) that supports a proprietary top-notch search engine, on an ads model that we all know.
So basically, reusing and opening your infrastructure pays off.
But what about the marketing efforts, can we expect better marketing through making our products basically.. free?

not necessarily.

It's a thin line that differentiates an effective marketing than "just another open source project" marketing.

Value, like always, is key. Instead of nice use case videos on Youtube, white papers, and your best press release on pr.com, you invest in making a relevant product for the community.

So what is the key?

The key is having the relevant open source product AND relevant paying futures for the conversions. Things like certified code for an enterprise version, good support level etc.

And how do you publish an open source product?

Open source products can be published at a code forge, there are many popular ones, and need their own marketing, let's call it the metamarketing. This would be the marketing investment to make the open source project relevant enough to save you marketing dollars for selling your Enterprise Software product from scratch.

Examples:
Providing integration and support services (Acquia)
● Selling subscriptions to updates and support (Red Hat)
● Selling proprietary components to segments of the user base (Funambol)
● Selling premium plugins, applications, services and themes (Joomla, WordPress)
● Selling hosting services (i.e. Software as a Service SaaS model, adopted by companies such as Acquia, Alfresco)
● Selling the software under a commercial licence and releasing the code under an open source licence simultaneously, aka Dual licensing (MySQL).
More on Open Source Business Models:
Open Source Business Models.
How to create successful open source business model

Must Read:

Is Oracle missing the point about open source and cloud? http://readwrite.com/2013/03/26/oracles-big-miss-the-end-of-an-enterprise-era

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