There is lot of revolution in Open Source Area and every other day we hear a new open source product in market or an open source acquired/taken over by commercial companies. Whatever be the case, everyone want that its product be listed among the best, whether it is a commercial product or an open source product. Community is one of the biggest asset for any product and it gains more importance in open source terms since they don’t have enough funds to market the product.
Community is heart of any product. Community consists of people from various walks of software company, like:
1. developers (working on it),
2. System Integrators (implementing solution for a client),
3. Stake holders(looking to evaluate product),
4. People who want to contribute to open source,
5. People comparing with other products etc.
Community is the place where almost 80% of technical queries, queries for people evaluating product etc. gets resolved without even reaching the product owners. Community also has strong saying on the road map of the product.
Already we see that community is doing a major support activity for a product. What lags is an effort from product owners towards community. What I see is, owners should make an effort to analyze the community users. One way, it will give more insight into who all and what all domains they are using in current offerings. This will definitely act as road map for the product. Secondly, they can get a bunch of people from community who understands the product well and can contribute heavily towards the future of the product together with the company. And thirdly, if they can arrange for a webcast/product information gatherings etc. of their product to a group of people from different walks of life, like SI, developers etc. it can help to promote the product many folds. Many clients now a days come to SI’s for a open source solution. So, if SI gets backing from product owners, surely it will be a big boost for open source product. One can argue, that this way open source product will loose their own revenue source. But I think that anyway there are lot of people implementing the solution without product owners so I do not think there will be much difference in that area. What will change is that the product will continue to grow due to its growing popularity. This will definitely start worrying Big fishes and will drive them to acquire product by paying handsome amounts.
