After watching the Linux and open source space for the better part of 12 years, it’s occurred to me several times that our largest problem is not technical — it’s promotions. Think about it — Linux is a fantastic desktop OS, and would be even better with more user momentum behind it (because we’d have far greater hardware support, etc.) — so why isn’t Linux taking the world by storm?

Partly because we have a PR problem. As Sarah Stokely

While desktop use of open source is less than one percent, this has been predicted to double this year. And with market penetration approaching 25 percent, open source browser Firefox is gradually eroding Internet Explorer’s lead in the browser market.

So how is it that even senior members of the IT sector can still be operating under the impression that open source has failed? This signals a big PR failure, not a technology failure. The visibility of open source is lagging way behind its capabilities. Despite being several decades old, open source and open licensing still needs proving to the market.

That’s so very, very true, and I’m glad to see people talking about the importance of marketing and PR for open source. Though marketing isn’t one of those things that open source developers get excited about, it is a necessary component to a successful project. Projects that fail to promote themselves usually don’t succeed.

This is something I’ll be talking about a lot — how openSUSE contributors (and other open source contributors) can help to promote the project.

I was brought on board, in part, to help increase the visibility of the openSUSE Project, and all the good stuff that’s being done by our developers. But, this isn’t something one person can do alone for any project — it’s possible for one person to spearhead the effort and be out in front of the project, but to be most effective, other folks from the community have to get involved too. So, what can you do?

A couple of things come to mind:

• Blog — I’d love to see openSUSE contributors blogging about their efforts and discussing the state of their projects — and, when needed, asking for help in areas where the project(s) could use assistance.
• Talk — I’ll be attending a lot of shows this year and giving talks about openSUSE and community issues. However, I’d like to see lots of openSUSE folks at shows and regional events discussing their specific projects and how to get involved with openSUSE. There are far too many LUG meetings and regional events for one human being to attend.
• Publish — Want to promote openSUSE and make some money, too? Yes! Publishers will actually pay for well-written articles that discuss open source technologies and/or tutorials that demonstrate how to use technologies. Lots of magazines and Web sites are hungry for author. Contact me if you want some advice on how to get in touch with these folks with a professional query letter. (Hint: writing “how about openSUSE?” to the editors address isn’t quite enough to convince an editor that you’re going to deliver a decent article…)
• Be Open and Friendly — I can’t stress this one enough. As an openSUSE user and contributor, you can help bring in more users simply by being friendly and supportive to new users. Never, ever “go negative” about other distros or OSes — just let people know what’s great about openSUSE, and they’ll be interested.

That’s four ways you can help promote openSUSE without any marketing background at all. You don’t know anything about “branding” or “messaging” to anyone — just take some time to publicize how you’re contributing to openSUSE (or other projects) and be positive about it. If the open source community can work together to overcome the technical hurdles that we’ve faced in creating Linux and the ecosystem of open source software we have today, surely we can tackle the PR problem.

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