What is marketing for open source and why does it matter to your users?

I once had a colleague who said, “marketing is making your product relevant to the market at, a given moment in time.” I’ve always liked this definition as it is succinct, quantifiable, and speaks to results rather than pure action. It also includes multiple marketing strategies, from the grassroots approach of putting code out there under an open source license and seeing where the interests are to a more comprehensive campaign leveraging press, analysts, events, digital promotion, and more. Either way, the goal is to ensure that the product is relevant to the market at that moment in time.

Open source, being the “scratch-your-own-itch” model I’ve referred to it as several times in this book, ties perfectly to the relevance aspect of what my former colleague would say. In Chapter 10, Commercialization of Open Source, the sustainability cycle diagram spoke to the need...