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Why open source projects are not publicised

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Microsoft

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 25 Nov 2005 13:55 GMT

...chief executive Steve Ballmer seized on the setbacks facing Munich's Linux migration.

"Yes, we lost the city of Munich," said Ballmer at the time. "But the fact that the same story gets told 65,000 times and there's still only one customer and they're still — how do I use a good, polite word here? — they're still diddling around to some degree to try to decide when they're really going to do the migration."

Some organisations do not publicise migrations as they don't want to run the risk of getting caught up in "Microsoft's FUD campaign", according to Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Brucherseifer says it's not just Microsoft that could seize on negative publicity — the open source community can also retaliate against problems with a migration, by posting hostile comments on blogs or forums.

"You can't plan everything with a migration — there's always a user who says this doesn't work for me. If the press talks to them it can lead to flaming," says Basyskom's Brucherseifer.

Negative publicity
The risk of negative publicity is particularly high if a migration is publicised before it is completed. Gerd Armbruster, who is managing an extensive migration to open source software at the city of Mannheim says that even though the project began last year, the decision was taken not to release the details to the press until last month, when the first stage of the migration was almost complete.

"For us it was very important that we could finish the migration before we went public — we wanted to present a success story. I wanted to be able to say, 'Mannheim has changed its whole infrastructure and it works'" says Armbruster.

Announcing pilot projects – even though they are seen as low-risk – can actually cause a lot of unwanted problems according to Neary from the GNOME Foundation. "Announcing a pilot can come back and bite you in the ass if you have to announce a year later that you're discontinuing," he says.

But it's not only the press that organisations are wary of. Some companies even choose to hide open source migrations from their own employees. "Most employees these days are used to proprietary software such as Microsoft. If you tell them it's different, they can get put off without even trying it. I've met CIOs who have said 'this is the new version of Word', when they've installed OpenOffice and people have swallowed it."

Open source — the poorer cousin
The silence that surrounds some open source deployments is not always intentional however. For some companies it comes down to a lack of resources — they may want to promote a project but when it comes down to it they don't have the money or personnel to make it happen. "The difference between open source and proprietary software is that no-one pays to make a huge hype around open source," says developer Fadhley.

For more, read part two of our special report on open source migrations: Open source projects: Why it pays to keep quiet.

Mozilla's Nitot agrees that open source vendors often don't have the resources to encourage customers to come out and talk about how good a product is. "A software vendor in the proprietary space has marketing teams that are going to write success stories. It costs a lot of money to do this — you will probably have to give the organisation a rebate and have to pay someone to write and publicise the story. In open source we can't do that, or not as much."