Use Case: an opensource product

Given the fact that you probably have no money to push the masses to you using the classical marketing techniques, such as giving out CDs, T-Shirts, stickers, free beers, organizing workshops, paying people to write about you, the only thing that remains is the code, its usability, and usability of your product.

Even if you had the money and tried to push the masses, there is still your code, and your code is now open. You can not play the marketing games, you are basically naked. If you want the community to participate, you have to make it easy to participate.

Use Case: a closed source product

Now compare that to commercial software, or enterprise software, or closed source software. Few people have access to the code. Few people understand it, no people are required to actually market it.

Developers that are paid by the company to work on a closed source product will do their work no matter what the quality of the code is or what the usability is. Marketing and sales will do their job, they have the space (and competitive advantage) of manipulating the masses by not showing the code and pretending that it is actually better.

Being opensource is not easier than being closed source

It is actually worse, you are naked, and you have to be perfect body shape and honest in character if you want the people to look at you. You have to write more documentation, tutorials, FAQs and other things to actually attract people.

Being opensource is feeling better

You had to make yourself more usable in order to compete with the closed source software and you can bet your code is at the moment easier to read, easier to maintain and easier to jump in and collaborate. Your product is accessible to more people and has a higher probability of surviving in the market.

The Rules

1. Make communication transparent and decision making visible.
2. Make it easy to participate (write documentation, tutorials, FAQs).
3. Focus on website usability (easy to find things, easy to study things without installing anything, screenshots).
4. Focus on code usability (easy to download, compile, test, and debug, no dependencies).
5. Focus on product usability (iPod rule).
6. Focus on integration (Java at the desktop sucks rule).

Final Note: silently assuming that your code actually solves the right problem in the right way, not every opensource product will automatically become the best available product on the market.

• Developers are always at the bleeding edge, they do not care about users, and the only option they recommend you most of the time is to upgrade to the new version of a product, that is better, faster, with more features, …, and of course more bugs. It is worth pointing out that the upgrade process is never as simple as typing:
  # apt-get update && apt-get -yu dist-upgrade.
• You are seeing things that were never meant to be seen again (also known as CZ: kostra ve skříni).
• You are faced with all tons of the latest-and-greatest technology (read: Java + XML + ORM + [insert your favorite enterprise standard]) that actually never simplified any work, but thanx to which you are very well paid because there are less and less people who can orient in all that mess.
• You think more and more about software usability and consider buying yourself a Mac computer.
• You end up frequently at The Daily WTF, but this time you are not laughing as you did before. The daily WTF experience became your daily bread.

Having been working as a software designer and developer since the beginning of my career, I really love the sustaining work because it is almost endlessly refreshing. See you at The Daily WTF.

for colleague in $(cat swac_members.txt) ; do
    echo "Thank You $colleague" ;
done

Some more pictures from the final party can be found here.