On Tuesday 22 May 2012 19:22:17 Alexandre bonhomme wrote:
Dear all, I read the wiki pages regarding marketing and strategy. Something remains not clear to me: how to we proceed at openSUSE to turn strategy definition and market share analysis into products and features?
This is something extremely hard in a F/OSS setting like openSUSE. Companies set goals and strategies top-down, then have this influence the work set by management for developers. We have no central authority and our contributors each have their own goals and reasons for helping out. Hence we don't have a strategy in the traditional sense. Note that this is true for the majority of Free Software projects - with those run in a top-down fashion as exception (eg Mozilla, Apache, Ubuntu and some others). In FOSS, strategy influences development in as far as it forms a shared set of goals and mindset, influencing individual developers to a certain degree. For us, strategy reflects status-quo and our near(er) term wishes and our philosophy, not a far-reaching, ambitious vision of where we might want to go. It's more of a clarification, focal point - and does in that way shape new contributors/contributions and can be a guide in discussions. Our strategy on the wiki has been the result of a long and hard process lasting well over 2 years and while minor changes might be doable, I doubt it'll go through a major revision anytime soon. But the next year might prove me wrong - IF it changes, however, it will be in response to changes around and within us, not the other way around.
Please, is there some place in which I can find this?
I'd recommend my blog, there's a number of posts about strategy: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com There's also some more writing about strategy in FOSS projects on the web but as I said - it's quite different from what you find in the corporate world and there's only a very small number of people who has any experience with it. It's also not extremely useful for us which might explain that ;-)
Thanks Best regards Alexandre -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+owner@opensuse.org