Spent most of last week in Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, I spent most of the week in Waltham for Novell’s FY10 Interlock meetings. Since I’m the “community guy” most of the stuff wasn’t directly related to my job, but it is good to know what’s going on with the rest of the company and have a chance to see what the marketing priorities are for FY10.
On Saturday, I spent some quality time at the GNOME Summit. Most of the sessions were developer-oriented, and so I spent some time catching up on email and getting a few things done until the marketing / outreach session. Jason Clinton does a good job of summarizing the session on his LiveJournal.
One of the discussions we had during the marketing and outreach session is whether the marketing should emphasize “Free” or emphasize the benefits of GNOME.
At this point, I’m firmly in the “benefits” camp. Yes, Software Freedom is massively important. To the people producing GNOME, anyway. To the people who are consuming GNOME, I’m not so sure. The existing community, yes. The prospective community — the people who we target with marketing — probably not so much.
Talking about Software Freedom to most people is an “eat your vegetables” approach to marketing. It’s like telling people that they should diet and exercise (and eat their veggies) in order to be healthy and live longer — all of which is true, and sound advice. But what motivates people to exercise and diet, usually? The message that they will look and feel better in the short term. You’ve all seen the “join a gym now so you’re ready for swimsuit season” advertisements. Convincing people that getting slimmer and healthier to live longer is a hard sell. Convincing people that they can be more attractive and so on — that tends to seal the deal. Even though living longer and being more generally healthy is more important than looking good — it’s not something that resonates with most people.
One of the things we talked about in the marketing meetings in Waltham is this idea: Logic leads to conclusions, but emotions lead to actions. You can make the logical argument about Software Freedom until the proverbial cows (or gnus…) come home, but if people aren’t buying it emotionally, they’ll stick with their existing stuff.
The same is true for Software Freedom. Convincing people who don’t code, don’t compile, and rarely even install their own OS that the FSF’s Four Freedoms are important is a pretty tough task.
It’s best to lead with the benefits that people will see immediately or nearly immediately. Yes, we can still talk about Software Freedom, but leading with that as a key message? It’s probably not going to have the effect we want when talking to the “average” user.
This is a hard mindset to adopt for people who do care deeply about Software Freedom. It’s not logical! Why wouldn’t people care a lot about this?! Probably for the same reason that people like RMS don’t care much about having the new shiny if it isn’t Free Software — it’s an entirely different set of priorities.
Now, you can take the approach that you’re going to change someone’s priorities and then they’ll naturally gravitate to Free Software. All you need to do is:
- Explain the difference between free software and proprietary software
- Explain why free software is better than proprietary software
- Explain why the benefits of free software apply to a person who doesn’t code or even know much about computers
- Convince them that the benefits are important enough to switch
- Then educate them on GNOME
The other approach is to de-emphasize the Free Software angle and emphasize the benefits of the project. This applies to GNOME, but it can apply equally well to openSUSE, or KDE, or any other project:
- Introduce them to the project
- Explain the benefits of the project, including Freedom
- Educate them on how to switch
I hope it’s obvious why strategy number one has not been terribly successful. Note that part of strategy number two includes making sure that the software is, in fact, better than the proprietary alternatives. That’s a lot of work, but it’s likely to be less work than convincing the majority of users that they should eat their vegetables and use the Free Software even if it’s not as easy to use or full-featured as the proprietary alternatives.
Totally agree with you – I vote benefits over free. Clients of mine such as Nuxeo (open source ECM) tell me they are winning deals on the merits of their technology when going against Documentum, OpenText, etc. The details of Nuxeo’s open source strategy are important. But from what CEO Eric Barroca tells me – that’s not what is landing them deals.
To me the really sad thing is the massive amount of work that goes into FOSS and then so many developers assume that because it’s FOSS everyone will want it.
Most “normal” computer users don’t dare mess with it- including software updates. They’re not going to make the jump to anything unless what the software provides is so wonderful that they can’t do without it.
Awesome article Zonker. Extended thoughts building on yours at http://tuxrocket.com/archives/apps/896
>Convincing people who don’t code, don’t compile, and rarely even install their own OS that the FSF’s Four Freedoms are important is a pretty tough task.
In my daily live I have made quite a different experience.
If I talk about technical benefits people always find a feature or simply a program which runs on Windows or MacOS and not on GNU/Linux. Talking about nice features of GNOME i always get a response like: “Yes, it’s definitely nice but freeware extension foo give me something similar for my operating system and what about my nice greeting card program I have bought at the discounter next to me? I will stick with my system and my programs”.
On the other hand a really successful path was always to explain the benefits of Free Software from a user point of view, don’t talk about source code. People don’t know what it is. I talk about a large pool of technically great programs all come directly with GNU/Linux and GNOME or KDE. Great integration because the programers are free to work together over boundaries. You are free to use this programs as you wish, share it with all your friends decide by your own when to upgrade, get regularly new versions. Your datas are stored in formats with everyone knows so you are save to read your documents also in 10+ years. etc. If people are business oriented talk to them about the advantage of Free Software for a free markte. If they are more on the administration side tell them about benefits for public administration. If they are more about eductaion talk about this advantages. And of course if they are more technical also talk about source code.
At the end show them taht to have all this benefits they don’t have to use complicated and technical bad software but there exists superior free software.
In my experience that was much more successful. That’s also why I love the term “Free Software” over “Open Source” because Free Software allows me much more to tune my arguments for the audience. I can talk about source code and development modell but I can also skip all the technical part and pick up the users at their interests: Control over their data, a lot of great software which can be freely sharend and used, benefits for business, benefits for education, benefits for public administration, benefits for social aspects, source code and development modells etc.
“Open Source” is always technical because people always ask “Why Source? What Source?” And necessarily you have to explain source code etc even if it is completely contra-productive for the audience you talk to.
To make it short. My experience:
- Talking about technical advantage will always end in a situation where someone come up with feature/program you can’t provide.
- Talking about the benefits of software freedom and tune your arguments for the audience will give you much more and lasting success
Is this really an either-or question? I think this leaves out the most important part: Listen. Yes, geeks can learn to listen!
There isn’t any one-size-fits-all marketing message; it always takes a multi-faceted approach. Find out what is important to people and then you’ll know if there is a suitable Free software solution to recommend to them. Ernie Ball is a great example of a company that valued freedom above all else after being terrorized by the BSA. Other businesses and users are driven by different imperatives, which we’ll never learn if we do all the talking.
Explaining the value of freedom isn’t /that/ hard. I say:
* This IM client doesn’t have ads; it was written by a community of programmers
* This word processor doesn’t deactivate after 30 days; it’s developed by a community of programmers
* I don’t have the problem of multiple programs trying to open the same file, or some unwanted application repeatedly setting itself as the default application to open that file type; I get my software from a bunch of projects that cooperate rather than ones that are fighting
A DRM argument is probably possible. etc. And, they ask where it came from, or you mention it’s called free software, or the idea was launched by a fed up programmer in 1983, etc. Not that hard.
We’ve got enough (corporate new best) friends who constantly change the subject from freedom to branding/features. That furthers their agenda, not the agenda of people who care about the long term sustainability of free software or open source.
Hello Zonker,
Can I ask, in what situation would you advocate for free software?
Here you say you don’t think it should be mentioned to new users, and in that previous post you were advocating that no one should point out the ethical issues with using proprietary software to people from the *FOSS community*. When is anyone to learn I am asking myself?
When a future Novell/Suse release gets a bad review and all your users who have learned no values from you, jump ship to a perceived “better” proprietary system, I am sure you will wonder, as the “community guy”, whether there might have been value in building a brand based upon ethics *and* quality.
Can I suggest you add a program to educate existing users about this software freedom. It might benfit for you in the longterm.
Christian.
I mostly agree except…
There are still many potential noob users that would appreciate freedom significantly and right off the bat or after a little warm-up work. This is particular true when dealing with the many developers that still have not caught on to Linux.
Also, freedom != vegetables in the sense that freedom doesn’t have immediate drawbacks while vegetables are usually rumored not to taste that great. We can get free software to taste great (look great, etc), but vegetables are stuck with their tastes. [BTW, I like many vegetables.]
And do make sure to bring freedom up even in cases where initially it won’t make as large of an impact.
In particular, we can undertake the separate job of *marketing freedom*. This is orthogonal to the selling of any particular piece of software and helps create a market for products and services based on freedom. Doing this also promotes the expansion of our healthy contribution-based community.
would it not be a better idea to try and market the benefits of FOSS we all know and love (community and freedom) in a way where it is useful to ‘average’ users?
KDE is trying to do that with the social desktop initiative, bringing KDE users closer together.
Not to be rude, but this is obvious. It’s nice to see someone saying it in a way which will gain more attention–for it is important and sometimes easy to forget–but anyone working in the corporate world can tell you that no one cares about software freedom and few care about license costs.
All you have to do to sell Free software is show that it can get the job done quickly. Once users (or managers) see that it is powerful and immediate they are on board. You can explain their freedoms to them later, so they can feel even better about their choice.
Years ago a sales & marketing seminar taught me “Lead with benefits. Follow with features.” As a software product developer, I used this advice for 20+ years to very good success.
If your product or service does not deliver benefits to your customers, sales are more fad and fancy than brand building. Your product is likely to become shelfware and your service likely won’t see much repeat business.
To some extent, this is why the selling of software is difficult. Many of the benefits are hard to quantify in cost-benefit terms — what is the dollar-value of ease-of-use, &c. Corporate bean counters want to see return on investment and ask, “what is the dollar-benefit?” Until we have good answers for this sort of question we sell “free” against “… its already go W__ installed …”
~~~ 0;-Dan
Normally people change for a benefit but afterwards they need reassurance that they made the right choice. So initially you have to demonstrate the benefits to them of the change; but after they have made the change, they normally see a lot more benefits from the decision than they did at the time they made it. Then you reinforce the decision with information about all the other reasons why they made the right choice.
I understand your view and share the same opinion in some aspects but if you don’t explain to the computer user about the freedom you’ll be causing a misinterpretation of the whole concept. At first contact with free software, people usually understands it as ‘free beer’ and that is not the point. Using an explanation omitting the freedom as the core of the subject you will give a wrong perspective and the user could assume that is wrong to charge for the software or believe that free software is related to ‘piracy’.
I think great part of RMS arguments about free software can be understandable to everyone, including end users, and we should use that more than try to sell some product which has no price as main advantage.
@Matheus At no point did I argue that freedom shouldn’t be explained. However, I think a lot of advocates make the mistake of leading with and even only focusing on the software freedom aspect. If you rely on software freedom as the sole or primary feature, you’re not going to get anywhere.
No product key codes, phoning home, tracking licenses, or cumbersome registrations. These are benefits, courtesy of software freedom.