Hi, Dave! Open Source is useful in a number of ways but there's no need to exaggerate its influence, especially not because some projects re-invented a known wheel after they threw the existing one away.
As a very simple example: Traditional marketing theory tells you to care about the distribution of your product. Firefox cared about it, and made it as simple as possible for its potential consumers: it offered a binary package taht worked on most distributions IIRC. Could you imaging Spreadfirefox's success when they would have offered a source tarball, only? Do you really think, some people blogging about the new, cool browser would have had any effects when people were required to compile Firefox first? But that's how the majority of open source projects deal with distribution. Seems to me traditional marketing considerations are still working: Firefox is one of the most successful open source projects ever. ;-) However, the main point is: Neither Open Source nor the Internet removes the basic economic and psychological circumstances that determines marketing; they merely change the rules slightly. Whether or not one of these technologies influences what you do depends on the market you're in. And I already wrote that the points made by Doc Searls seem to fit a geek2geek market very well. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list