Open Source is Marketing

This is an opinion post. Editorial insight was strongly encouraged but was as usual, utterly ignored.

"Open Source is Marketing" - this is a phrase I've found myself telling people over the past year or so. It's weird cause the phrase typed out just sounds almost like an oxymoron.

Ogilvy would be proud.

The Good Old Days
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To me software has always been a creative tool. Maybe the cross between a paintbrush and a screwgun.

The open source I grew up with was true wild west, choose your own adventure style stuff. You were handed a loaded gun in the form of a tarball found on some random un-secured ftp site and told good luck. You could kill a wild turkey or you could equally shoot your face off. Support was in the form of emailing the author and maybe opting yourself into some politico rant on why XYZ Corp wouldn't release their drivers or to argue over the finer aspects of what malloc implementation was appropriate.

You'd be surprised at the amount of open source software that is used to this day that is decades old and is in such disarray, but so widely deployed in language interpreters, operating system package managers, and layers upon layers of dependency chains that if 'national security' was an actual thing vs. a government scare tactic there'd be a TSA for software dependencies - libxml for one - (ex: what is a ftp server doing in there?) Don't take this as offense to the original authors - just realization that our systems are filled to the capacity with very old software that does not reflect current day thinking.

My recent work has really opened up my eyes to how incredibly fragile most software really is (and this is coming from a guy with a security background).

Towards the late 00's after the first tech bubble had blown it's lid and a new undercurrent was underway, we found ourselves in a post-Facebook world where every JimBob that had ever been asked to 'code' up a website found their collective selves looking for faster ways to get things done. Sourceforge had already peaked and sites like Github started springing up.

I'm not blaming Github but rather marking the date. Over the next decade development was not found traditionally on newsgroups where you had to have a procmail rule for each project but on 'github issues'. A thousand irc networks converged into one - freenode - there was no question where a popular irc channel was based - it was just guaranteed to be on freenode. I think the entire efnet/undernet crowd moved to the so-called 'dark internet' - spooky!

Rise of the Developer Evangelists
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To the uninitiated, developer evangelists are a lot like their missing cousin-in-law the customer success agent. The role exists to buffer company developers, whose attitudes can be quite nasty sometimes, and the public facing image of the product *ahem* project. I think enough project managers had learned that they couldn't have their senior engineers tell that brand new customer to go RTFM anymore.

This of course is the classic scene of Office Space - "I speak to the customers so the goddamn developers don't have to. I'm a people person goddamnit."

To be clear - I have lots of colleagues/friends that fill this role and this is not intended to be disparaging.

Software development used to be relegated to the introverted, possibly socially shy crowd - not anymore.

In the crazy explosion of ultra low interest rates venture capital went on a raging bull ride pumping money into everything that was predicated on employing software engineers. Re-read that real quick and let it sink in.

The Reality
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Open source is marketing. It sends a shudder down the spines of Richard Stallman and his friends. Free love, pot and linux is now t-shirts, vinyl stickers and alcohol fueled meetups and conferences. Nowadays, company centered meetups are just as popular as the company t-shirt.

There's a joke on the twitters about open source being a broken microwave left on the sidewalk and it's honestly not far from the truth.

Open source is not a business plan or a 'go to market' strategy. This is VC speak for "How the hell do we expect to not lose our shirt in this ridiculous investment we've made? Our LPs are going to kill us!"

Today - if you correct a typo you have taken part in 'open source'. There's nothing wrong with improving documentation or correcting grammar but if that's 90% of the activity what is the 10%?

I feel that encouraging this behavior is walking down the wrong road. Does it help with 'community involvement'? Sure, but that's the problem. Now you are doing nothing more than content marketing - it's ceased to be software.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you don't have to use 'open source' as your marketing channel.

Docker is probably the poster child of this 'open source marketing' strategy but you even have companies like Google taking part. The joke going around is that Kubernetes is just a marketing ploy to get people to use Google Cloud while Docker makes money by selling t-shirts.

I don't know how anyone can take that ecosystem seriously with the childish behavior that is perpetuated in it though. It's a disgrace to all software engineers everywhere and it's starting to give our profession a very bad name.

Unlike some of my peers, I am not concerned about supposed trends towards ecosystem lock-in or the homogenization of systems from the containerization people. That will just pave the way for others to come in and help companies out of the tirefire they got tricked into falling into.

It's my prediction that sometime probably next year we'll start seeing the containerization ecosystem implode just like the "clean tech" fad did.

Sorry, but marketing towards developers in general is a horrible strategy and
they make horrible customers to boot. No one is arguing that you can't market the hell out of something and get the eyeballs, but I don't think that's the same thing as providing enough value to the point that someone says "This is incredible - take all of my money - fix my problem.".

Here's the point

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It's ok to make money. You don't have to prop up your dog and pony show with a bunch of superfluous bullshit.

OMG!? What a capitalist! I remember being at a YC event a few years ago and some person asked PG a question that started with the phrase "In a capitalist society..." - I don't remember the rest of the question and it's not entirely important but I so dearly remember the look on PGs face and his stark response - "What!?" - I couldn't contain it and cracked up so hard.

The most valuable processes are just that - business processes that you have honed over the years - key insights that you have gained from having to deal with these things economists call 'customers'. The people that actually give you money in exchange for the value you bring them - not the ones that try to see how many twitter or Github stars they can achieve.

These are the intangibles that give you the leg up.

Then it's the derivative of those processes that actually produce value.

Position -> velocity -> acceleration.

So what is the solution?
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I honestly don't know since it's a bit external. I'd advise those who are concerned to just tune it out.

Focus on your own IP and your business processes. Refuse to keep up with the Joneses - if you are a developer that means no need to adopt the 'hot new technology'. If nothing else, stick with the 'boring' technology until you see need to innovate and then do so on your own terms - not ones set by others.