Somehow I missed this yesterday, but SpringSource have acquired Covalent, as the January "month of M&A in OSS" continues. Ugo gives his view, as does Marc Fleury and Emmanuel Bernard.
Marc's analysis is interesting, though I think he only lightly touches upon a subject that could do with more discussion:
"[...] the bigger problem is the ASF brand. The Apache and ASF brands obfuscates every other brand [...]"
I agree that the brand is a problem, though in my opinion the problem is that the brand is too weak, and not overpowering as Marc seems to imply. Certainly when compared with the decision makers' mindshare of Microsoft.*, IBM.*, Oracle.* etc.
Whilst I understand that in open source it's not cool to be blatant self-promoters or to use obnoxious marketing tactics, I think the sheer success of Ruby on Rails has demonstrated that sometimes a little bit of commercial savvy can make a huge difference to the success and adoption of a technology.
Having rockstar open source projects such as Wicket or Hadoop in the ASF certainly helps, but it seems to me that Apache comes across more like a sleeping giant than as the dynamic melting pot of best-of-breed that it really is.
I'm not quite sure how a diverse community like Apache could best promote itself, but a good start might be a dynamic and reinvigorated ApacheCon. As some of the "brightest minds in open source" we ought to be able to offer something more fresh and innovative than just the "same old, same old" year after year.
Is it wrong to build a brand around an Open Source project or foundation? Debian resisted and plods along, known by the cognoscenti but otherwise obscure, while Ubuntu is an example of branding success. (Grossly simplifying the situation, I know.)
Technorati Tags: apache, branding, community, marketing, open source, opensource, software
Posted by savs at January 31, 2008 5:34 AM