Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hi Bruce. Thank you for joining me for the interview.

Bruce Perens: You're welcome.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you. First question: what are you up to these days?

Bruce Perens: My most important title is Daddy. I have an eight year-old son. His name is Stanley. He's a developing geek. And a really great little guy. And one of the things that you realize when you're a parent, especially of a guy who's like us, is that their brains are really fully developed, in a way, by the time they're six or eight. He has an incredible memory - he's always just cataloguing everything in his mind, and he can put the combinations together, and just shock myself and his mom about what's coming out of his head on a day to day basis. He's a happy kid and, of course, I get him interested in science and things like that. We have a lot of scientific stuff in the house - microscopes and electronics and etcetera - which he and I are playing with from time to time. So that's a lot of fun.

And then, you know, I'm an Open Source evangelist, and this is the way I've been making my living since 1999 when I left Pixar. Most of the time, I've been either working as an officer of a company or being an independent consultant. Started with Linux Capital Group, and then Hewlett-Packard, and then SourceLabs - and between that it's been Perens LLC - and of course, companies have their ups and downs. With Linux Capital Group, the market collapsed and we just decided to get out of it instead of keeping going until we went broke. Hewlett-Packard was very interesting and, of course, their Open Source effort is still very successful. But we had that awful merger and they eventually got rid of Carly, but that was too late and I was already gone. In the case of SourceLabs - SourceLabs really didn't work out, and that's unfortunate. And developing each of these companies has been a really interesting experience.

In between them, I am working on consulting independently. For example, today my customers are Symbian, are a company in the gambling industry in Las Vegas... And that's interesting - there are gambling casinos that are very software-intensive, and one of the things you don't realize is that when you go play a game in a casino slot machine, that slot machine is running Linux. They don't want the "blue screen of death" when somebody is putting their money in that thing. And there have been efforts to intercommunicate between the machines more on the casino floor, and so they've started to ask for open standards around that. And that is why I was brought in: I was seen as a standards evangelist in the larger industry who could help a vertical market (which is what casino gambling is) learn themselves about developing open standards. So that's been a lot of fun. It's an interesting way to make money because it's very very different from anything I've ever done, and yet their needs are very much the same as the things that we went through between the 80s and today, in the overall IT industry.

I also advise a number of governments - the Norwegian government has been the best customer. I'm finishing a three-year grant from them and that has allowed me to teach there and advise their government, bring my family to Norway for two summers. It's a fully paid vacation for them, but of course I was working. And that was important too, because my little boy got to see how things run in a different country. And, you know, Americans don't travel enough, so I wanted him to be different. Now he's seen that there are some places, potentially, a little more civilized than the United States has been.

I also make, I'd say about half my income, from public speaking. At the moment, because I'm an independent consultant, I have to charge for speaking, and this is actually a very rare show [i.e. OpenExpo 2008 in Switzerland], because this one got it for free, but most of them don't. When I'm sponsored by a company, I generally get paid a salary and I go speak and don't charge wherever I'm speaking.

I might go into another company again if somebody gives me a good deal. But I really like being independent and I like being the boss. It has its downsides too which are, you have to go out and market your business to people and you can't just do what you want.

Sandro Groganz: Sounds like a very fulfilled life and that's wonderful, I guess! Let's start with a question about Open Source marketing. And it's a simple question: why should an Open Source company market itself?

Bruce Perens: Open Source has some very interesting perspectives of marketing. I started out marketing the very idea of Open Source to the world, which was incredibly successful - so successful that I can't possibly take credit for it, because the world was obviously ready for it to happen. I think six months after I did the first announcement of Open Source as a campaign, a press reporter asked Steve Ballmer from Microsoft whether they would open source Windows. And Steve Ballmer started explaining to the reporter that Open Source wasn't just source code, it was kind of licensing. And I realized at that point that Ballmer had read this manifesto that I wrote, and was explaining it to the press! I was just this guy in a cubicle at Pixar at the time, who had helped put this idea out and, of course, I was standing on the shoulders of Richard Stallman and others.

Sandro Groganz: So what I get from what you're saying is that when you do marketing, sometimes it's just the right time to do something?

Bruce Perens: Obviously in marketing, you have to find out what the customer wants and then you work on giving it to them. And one of the biggest things a company has to do strategically, is to just find the demand that they can fulfill better than anyone else. The second important difference about Open Source and marketing, is that very many proprietary software companies have a big problem connecting the customer and the product. Open Source is different in that it potentially connects the customer and the product at a very low cost, because the customer goes out, they download the software, they try it, they understand whether it solves their need or not, and then they become your customer. So, in a way, the customers for Open Source are "self-locating", in a way that it's very hard to do for proprietary software. Even if you have these limited demos that proprietary software sometimes gives out, you don't really have the kind of community that Open Source develops. And the users see that as very important too, because they're able to locate people like them who are using something and care enough to talk about it...that doesn't happen very much with proprietary software.

And then we get to what you really want to talk about, which is why should Open Source companies market themselves? We live in a very competitive market in general, and Open Source has other Open Source and proprietary software to compete with. Getting those customers to have knowledge about the Open Source software is becoming more difficult, especially since, if they go to look for some software, they look on Google or Freshmeat or something like that, they're going to get a big list and your product is going to be somewhere in that list. And what you want to do potentially is create buzz about that product and give the user good messages.

We really have two kinds of marketing here: one is marketing communications and the other is strategic marketing. Marketing communications is all about press, PR and advertising. And your big job in marketing communications is trying to make the absolute most of press and public relations, because they get you more than advertising, often. And advertising is expensive whereas press and PR are often very inexpensive. Press and PR are often perceived by the customer as more "honest" than advertising. So those are the things that are really important to work on, and fortunately, the fact that you are Open Source is still interesting to a lot of the press. So it makes it easy to get interviews..."Look, these guys are sharing their software and they're still making a living". It's worked for me for eight years now...nine years, in fact, since I left Pixar.

The other thing is strategic marketing, which is just looking at what market niche are you in, how do you make the customer aware of that, how do you satisfy the customer, where should your business be going? Actually, I sometimes dislike the word "marketing", because there are these two things that are so very...different. And I actually saw a case in which a guy who was a straight marketing communications professional was hired as the head of strategic marketing for a company where he didn't know a thing about it. That's how confusing it can be.

Sandro Groganz: The Open Source marketing idea even spreads into other businesses and Chris Andersen developed the idea of the "long tail" and "free is the new business". What do you think, is Open Source innovating marketing itself?

Bruce Perens: I had coffee with Chris a month or so ago. He and I both live in Berkeley. Chris thinks I don't get it, and I think Chris doesn't get it. It's correct, Chris, that "free" is really important and gee, this is the fact that everybody has known about sales for a hundred years, that "free" is very important. The "long tail" is interesting and I think it's not tremendously well-developed and it hasn't worked all that well for a number of companies. A number of the classic "long tail" companies  - for example, Voyager, which was niche market video  - weren't able to make it, they were not able to develop sufficient market. This is the big problem now. People are still working on those kinds of companies, trying to find ones that work, and there are a lot of casualties along the way.

What I think Chris doesn't get is the whole "sharing with rules" aspect. BSD license is fine for a number of things, but I think a lot of people discount the innovation of the GPL and just how useful the GPL is as a business tool. For example, look at MySQL, where MySQL was able to run a successful dual-licensing system. OK, they gave it away to the people who were willing to have it under those rules, and they sold it to the people who weren't. That company only existed for nine years before it went into Sun Microsystems. The MySQL server was mostly the product of one person, one programmer, Monty Widenius. Having done that work for nine years, those guys sold that company for 1.1 billion dollars to Sun Microsystems, and there weren't that many founders....and they're all quite wealthy today! So that is really an example of where GPL worked incredibly well for a business.

There are counter-examples. For example, Trolltech sold their business to Nokia, I feel for not very much money, and we have to look at how big a market they built and how much capital they had left. The point was that MySQL was ready to do their Initial Public Offering, they had enough money to go on, they were very profitable. Trolltech had done an Initial Public Offering, they were on the market, their stock was not all that high up, and then they sold at what was really a low for the company. It was a matter of timing for them. If they had kept themselves private, had private investment for longer, it would have worked much better for them. So those are two companies where I think GPL was a really important part of the business.

Now, who do we have who's using BSD license on software that they sell and is making money? You have projects like Apache and Eclipse where there's a tremendous amount of business collaboration, and none of those businesses are in this to sell that product. That's the difference! The BSD license is fine for that if you don't intend to sell that product. If you actually need to make money from what you're writing, OK, we pick a different license. These are things that people don't really understand about the strategic marketing side of Open Source: picking your license is really key.

Sandro Groganz: Concerning the brand of an Open Source company - now we're going back to market communications - how important is the brand for a company like MySQL, for example?

Bruce Perens: MySQL did great about brand creation and brand awareness. They did a good job on the name of the company and it was totally by accident, really - they just had, what was it, M-SQL before that, and they forked off so it was My-SQL, and not a person in the company knew a thing about marketing at that time. But, it was a really good name for the product because it was combining YOU - who is marketing intended to reach? It's YOU - and what it did. They did a great job on their logo - that was reasonably early but yes, that was professional marketing.

But I think what MySQL did best was, they made themselves very visible by that "free" part and, they were an early entrant into the "free database" thing. That was a strategic marketing issue. They had that as a very big business differentiator from pretty much everyone else in database except for Sleepycat, and Sleepycat had the database but not the SQL. MySQL had their whole network, in that they had a very active web site with discussion about their product, with tutorials, and they ran very effective education.

When you actually paid for that MySQL license, you didn't really think you were buying a license. You knew you had to have it, and you justified it that way, but you knew you would get education and support for that business. The education part was also really key, because many of the Open Source businesses that just sold support failed because their customers were early adopters of Open Source and early adopters are self-supporting. MySQL, by combining education and by getting into a market where there is in general less emphasis on self-support than an operating system might have ... I think they picked their product really well (again entirely by accident) for one that actually worked commercially, from that perspective.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you very much for the interview.

Bruce Perens: All right. Thank you.