Can opensource projects be leveraged for marketing? 🤔
There is an important piece @ShopWindow definitely needs.
The only options are paid ones, pretty powerful but expensive as F**K and I can imagine there would be some interest on some opensource alternative.
The question is: are opensource projects good to generate popularity?
Opinions?
If you are trending on GitHub, you'll have a great visibility.
There are some tips : https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-my-first-project-won-6000-stars-on-github-in-5-days-6340ec99829e/
I would argue that for the well-know systems, open source becomes the most important marketing channel even if they did not start that way. And it works reasonably well for them. As the issues of sustainability of the open source development model raise (mainly because of how large cloud providers make a profit from these applications instead of their developers), one of the recommended solutions is to use some form of double licensing: keep the open source version and provide consulting or an extended "enterprise" version for significant fees. For smaller, utility like projects, I do not think this path can work but I can still increase your visibility and credibility as a developer. I personally benefited a lot indirectly to contribute to open source projects.
They could at some cases.
Sidekick is a project that's core is open source and sells premium service, there is an indiehacker podcast episode with him. ElasticSearch and wordpress are big examples of part opensource part product / support..
Specially stuff like integration plugins I frequently followed and discovered service from.
Like if I use X and need some feature Y that's not core, I'd look for an integration, while it doesn't actually matter if it's open source or not, many commonly are...
I've popular open source project that kinda become defunct in favour of a commercial one (with some free offer it's a nice marketing thingy)
Was another guy that just helped in opensource with tickets and such and later got many paid gigs based on his involvement with the project..
It could become just double marketing in some cases, needing to promote the opensource project which would in turn promote the main business.
You can also look at less code based opensource concepts like distributing infographics freely or free content as a form of non code opensource..
Amazing insight! Thanks a ton!
This case would be a bit different: paid core service, then there is some missing piece that would require very expensive paid software.
Just thinking that it makes no harm sharing something that could save some money to someone else too and would be easily extensible with modest contributions.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond! :)