Matthew Revell

There are five broad types of marketer in the open source world:

• Town criers: shout loudly but not always clearly, don’t listen, make a big noise but actually only reach a tiny number of people.
• Frustrated philosophers: so interested in the academic niceties of marketing that they mostly fail to communicate with anyone.
• Secondary practitioners: they fell into marketing-like practices by doing something else and probably wouldn’t think of what they do as marketing.
• Professional visitors: one of the small but growing group of professional marketers employed by open source software companies, for whom open source is just another job. Further divided into those that engage with the community and those that don’t.
• The people that get it: they know the difference between free software and open source, they’re a part of the community and they know marketing.

I reckon professional visitors and town criers will be the two groups that grow fastest over the next year. Increased commercialisation of open source will feed the professional visitors. Increased interest in open source by non-coders will add to the town criers.

There’s nothing wrong with the people in either group; we just need to help them become the people that get it. We should take the lead by engaging the professional visitors. We should establish a marketing meritocracy and learning path to help the town criers become more effective.