As some of you know, every August Toasterz sponsors OpenGroupware.org at Linux World Expo San Francisco. This year I had the pleasure of taking Linux Journal contributing editor, Reg Charney out to lunch to discuss OpenSource developer toolsets and other topics.

It took about 2 minutes to express my distrust of OpenSource IDE's in general, at least until they cease to be moving targets. I like simple and stable; vi via ssh. Maybe next year I'll try Eclispe again.

The remainder of the time was spent discussing FLOSS, groupware, and LAMPgroup. Mr. Charney apeared to be a pretty conservative guy and I wanted to see how he would react to some more controversial ideas. Marketing of OpenSource came up early and as LinuxWorld is all about marketing...

Marketing Is Dead!

If not dead, largely irrelevant. As FLOSS is primarily about the developer, of what use is marketing? I argued that marketing was a proprietary, paternalistic, old-world, 20th century, quasi-militaristic dinosaur of a concept, to which the OpenSource community is largely immune. I think of it as cultural white noise.

Really, think about it, in a meritocracy, marketing is not needed. The best ideas, concepts, expressions, whatever, wins. Marketing activities place a needless layer of artiface in the free exchange of ideas. Must it be necessary to gently remind yet again of the success of the unencumbered scientific method?

I propose that all references to marketing, marketing tricks, smoke and mirrors etc. -- marketing artiface -- when applied to OpenSource be called more precisely, Martiface. Maybe it would be good if we openly addressed what exactly it is that our mainstream companies do in order to maximize profits.

Communist! You shout in dismay... not so at all. I'm for profit honorably earned. Any profits gained otherwise is theft or at best, fraud. Then again, I'm old fashioned.

The crux of the problem of advocating FLOSS is that decision makers are still succeptible to martketing wiles. Unfortunately, Martiface remains relevant and effective when applied to this group. We should address this reality consciously and consistently as a community.

Mr. Charney was initially of the position that marketing was an expression of natural linguistic message exchange, albeit on a mass media level. I suggested that nothing was further from the truth.

In fact, Martiface messsages are so aggressive and pervasive that we're blind to its shrill effects. I reminded him that the natural liguistic model of communication is direct and, most importantly, reciprocal. Marketing, excuse me, Martiface, is neither. After asserting that the closest meaningful analog was propaganda as practiced during times of war, Mr. Charney scratched his head and moved on to another topic. As it happens, we discussed his new real estate project in the works.

For a Linux Journal contributor, I found him to be quite staid and bland intellectually. Nice guy though.

More later.