184 lines
12 KiB
HTML
184 lines
12 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
|
||
<html newsdate="2009-06-04">
|
||
<version>2</version>
|
||
|
||
|
||
<head>
|
||
<title>It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand</title>
|
||
</head>
|
||
|
||
<body>
|
||
|
||
<h1>It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand</h1>
|
||
|
||
<p>There are a couple of “beginner’s mistakes” when
|
||
thinking about Free Software in general and its commercial application, in
|
||
particular. One is to believe there was a substantial difference in the
|
||
software referred to by the terms “Free Software” and “Open Source.” <a
|
||
href="/freesoftware/freesoftware.html">There isn’t</a>. As far as the
|
||
actual software is concerned, both terms are as synonymous as things get in
|
||
real life, with experts debating about details around the fringes. The
|
||
differences between the terms lie in <a
|
||
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Framing_in_politics">framing</a>
|
||
and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand">brand</a>.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>From the perspective of brand management, Open Source is a failed re-branding
|
||
effort over which <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html">its creators lost control</a>, followed by brand degradation
|
||
through abuse and over-extension into areas such as business and development
|
||
models. This has become another beginner’s mistake in Free Software, as
|
||
highlighted in “<a href="/news/2008/news-20081202-02.html">What makes a Free Software company?</a>”. </p>
|
||
|
||
<p>In <a href="http://kanarip.livejournal.com/14584.html">a recent article</a>, <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JeroenVanMeeuwen">Jeroen van Meeuwen</a> raised the point of brand awareness, and
|
||
the fact that a brand can never be strictly controlled or managed, because it
|
||
ultimately refers to “<a href="http://www.peachpit.com/content/images/0321348109/goodies/The_Brand_Gap.pdf">anyone’s gut feeling</a>” about something. But this does not
|
||
mean that branding issues should be ignored, because it is possible to influence
|
||
anyone’s gut feeling, as some corporations have demonstrated over the years. But
|
||
there is no brand manager for Free Software, and there is no communication
|
||
discipline on issues of brand among the many people, projects, organisations,
|
||
companies and governmental bodies that make up the Free Software ecosystem. </p>
|
||
|
||
<p>This is the strategic weakness that companies like Microsoft and SAP are seeking
|
||
to exploit when they do their own shaping of what anyone’s gut feeling about the
|
||
terms “Open Source” and “Free Software” might be. Unsurprisingly, their idea of
|
||
what people’s gut feeling should be revolves around dominance of “mixed models”
|
||
of proprietary and Free Software. Besides noteworthy write-ups on <a href="http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=216">the Free
|
||
Software Economy</a>, Carlo Daffara also published some <a href="http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=259">good evidence</a> on why the
|
||
mixed models are not among the most important and on the decline. So there is
|
||
very little data to back up the spin provided by SAP, in particular, but there
|
||
is a very clear motivation. If it becomes anyone’s gut feeling that mixed models
|
||
are indeed the norm, it would allow them to leverage the strategic benefits of
|
||
Free Software for themselves, while withholding them from their customers in
|
||
order to extract monopoly rent on their own products.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p >Another approach by which companies such as SAP and Microsoft seek to steer the
|
||
brand is by escalating, aggravating and encouraging conflict between false
|
||
enemies, and by seeking to harmonize the wider community with false friends.</p>
|
||
|
||
<h2>False Enemies and False Friends</h2>
|
||
|
||
<p>There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form
|
||
of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and
|
||
framing issues, more specifically in the area of “Free Software” vs “Open
|
||
Source.” Name-calling and quarrelling on either side is not helpful, and serves
|
||
to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful
|
||
message.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to
|
||
anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focussing on past insults and
|
||
wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realise that what
|
||
divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and
|
||
exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either
|
||
side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations,
|
||
and positive feedback loops.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>The second form of false enemies use Free Software according to the parameters
|
||
defined by the license chosen for a certain project, but do not contribute back.
|
||
These companies make use of the freedoms that were explicitly granted, but often
|
||
find themselves heavily criticised for falling into the gap between unwritten
|
||
community rules and explicit legal regimes. This criticism conveys a rather
|
||
unhelpful lesson: Use of Free Software gives rise to public criticism and risks
|
||
the company’s public profile.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>This is not the message the Free Software community should want to send. Active
|
||
citizenship is an asset, and should be encouraged. But as long as companies meet
|
||
their legal obligations, they should be at liberty to be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit">hermits</a>. Not only is it
|
||
impossible to enforce willing pro-active participation, through public criticism
|
||
and stigma public perception of these companies overlaps with those who break
|
||
the explicit legal rules. This discourages legal discipline and weakens the
|
||
brand by confusing “anyone’s gut feeling.”</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>The alternative is to welcome any party taking measures to be a good citizen and
|
||
follow the explicit legal rules, and grant them liberty to choose their own
|
||
path. The value of active participation and contribution has to be taught, not
|
||
forced upon. Once such companies understand the strategic implications of
|
||
forsaking the opportunity to co-shape the direction of the platform one’s
|
||
business depends upon to competitors, it is likely that more active citizenship
|
||
will follow as the logical consequence.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>The Free Software community needs to allow for a learning curve, and distinguish
|
||
between good citizens – be they active or not – and false friends, which seek to
|
||
maximise their own benefit at the expense of others. There are two typical
|
||
strategies these companies employ: license abuse and brand abuse.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>License abuse is most often related to non-compliance with the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General
|
||
Public License (GPL)</a>, as the GPL is not only the most popular Free Software
|
||
license overall, it is also the flagship license of the Copyleft principle and
|
||
used for the vast majority of the GNU/Linux system. Free Software licenses are
|
||
based on copyright, so violation of these licenses can and is being prosecuted
|
||
by groups such as gpl-violations.org, <a href="/activities/ftf/">FSFE’s Freedom Task Force</a>, the FSF’s GPL
|
||
Compliance Lab and the SFLC. Groups such as the <a href="http://ev.kde.org/">KDE e.V.</a> are building their own
|
||
legal infrastructure and <a href="http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/08/fla-for-kde-wee.html">consolidate their copyright</a> also because this will
|
||
enable them to more effectively curb license abuse in the future.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>So license abuse is increasingly well covered, and there is public material
|
||
available, such as <a href="/activities/ftf/reporting-fixing-violations.html">FSFE’s guide to reporting and fixing license violations</a>, the
|
||
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html">FSF’s GNU GPL FAQ</a>, or the <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org/">SFLC</a>’s <a href="http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html">Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free
|
||
Software Projects</a>. The room for license abuse is shrinking dramatically, and
|
||
while genuine mistakes still happen and are typically fixed through cooperative
|
||
structural remedies by <a href="/activities/ftf/">FSFE's FTF</a> and others, repeated mistakes are unlikely to
|
||
meet unlimited patience, as the lawsuits of the past years have demonstrated.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Brand abuse is more subtle in comparison. At times accompanied by license abuse,
|
||
the typical brand abuse takes the form of companies marketing their proprietary
|
||
products as “Open Source.” The vector for this abuse is “anyone’s gut feeling”
|
||
that Open Source translates to “visible source code.” This criterion is
|
||
insufficient to meet the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd">guidelines</a> set by the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source Initiative (OSI)</a> for
|
||
what constitutes Open Source, but seems to dominate a significant part of the
|
||
brand at the moment.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>There is also brand abuse taking place for “Free Software”, but this abuse seems
|
||
less profitable and thus less prevalent, as it plays on the mistaken gut feeling
|
||
that Free Software is defined by zero price, although the <a href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html">definition by the FSF</a>
|
||
highlights the four freedoms as the defining set of criteria and the <a href="http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines">Debian Free
|
||
Software Guidelines</a> describe what was later used as the definition for the term
|
||
Open Source.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Even if it weren’t for the common root of all definitions, combination of terms
|
||
such as “FOSS” and “FLOSS” has firmly tied both brands together in public
|
||
perception. Gut feeling about one has bearing on the other, people make the
|
||
assumption that Open Source is always gratis, and that Free Software means that
|
||
the source code is visible. So brand abuse and degradation is an issue that
|
||
affects the entire Free Software ecosystem, regardless of preferred branding and
|
||
framing.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>That brand degradation is harmful for all companies and commercial endeavours in
|
||
Free Software, as it weakens the ability to communicate an essential part of the
|
||
unique sales proposition. This was also the guiding reason for FSFE‘s “<a href="/activities/whyfs/whyfs.html">We speak
|
||
about Free Software</a>” initiative and has been thematised in Mark Taylor’s article
|
||
“<a href="http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/comment/0,1000002985,39578370,00.htm">What vendors really mean by ‘open source’</a>”.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Since brand is about public perception, the only remedy is through public
|
||
communication to re-focus the brand. This would necessarily include elements
|
||
such as information about the true meaning of the brand, criticism of brand
|
||
abuse by the entire community – commercial and non-commercial entities alike –
|
||
and exclusion of brand abusive companies from formal or informal cooperation to
|
||
avoid legitimising their redefinition of the common brand.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Control over a brand can never be absolute simply because one voice, no matter
|
||
how powerful, will never be able to drown out the many individual voices of all
|
||
the people whose gut feeling defines the brand. There may be an advantage in a
|
||
single message for a single brand, as it is typically handled by any particular
|
||
corporate entity for its own products and name. But when it comes to public
|
||
perception, there may also be an advantage to a community of millions that has a
|
||
common interest to keep its brand strong.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>While the message of brand abusing companies often seems to align very well with
|
||
the community, they live at its expense, putting actual Free Software companies
|
||
at a competitive disadvantage. It is time this community of people, companies,
|
||
organisations and governmental bodies understood the relevance of keeping its
|
||
brand strong to empower itself and its own.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Because shaping anyone’s gut feeling ultimately is in anyone’s power, yours
|
||
included.</p>
|
||
|
||
</body>
|
||
|
||
<tags>
|
||
<tag key="front-page"/>
|
||
<tag key="competition">Competition</tag>
|
||
<tag key="enterprise">Enterprise</tag>
|
||
</tags>
|
||
|
||
<author id="greve" />
|
||
</html>
|