[ubuntu-uk] Marketing [Was Re: efi boot, Windows 8 and Linux]

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 22/09/11 10:50, alan c wrote:
>
> The FLOSS world's lack of competence, or even appetite, for publicity
> or marketing is the elephant in the room.
>
> 1) FLOSS, GNU/Linux etc, 'marketing' is pretty well non existent
> compared to non free products. 'I advertise, therefore I exist'
> (apologies to Descartes).
>
> 2) Of all things, marketing is -very- unsuited to the free libre,
> distributed model.
>

It isn't "marketing" per se that's the issue. It is, plain and simply money.

I read an article somewhere several years ago about how much money is 
spent on advertising/marketing by commercial software vendors. It was 
something extremely high, like 50% (I think it may have been more) of 
their entire REVENUE was spent telling people why they should buy their 
products, and 10% or so was spent on actually making the product...

To market something successfully costs a great deal of money. Free 
Software, because of how it is produced and delivered, will never have 
the kind of budgets that MS/Oracle/INSERT VENDOR_OF_CHOICE_HERE have to 
spend.



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