Firefox: An Model for Open-Source Promotion
Almost every open-source project, no matter if it currently has ten or a million users or even more, would like to grow and have more users. Few projects, though, are good at promoting their software. Strangely, the same ideas are talked about over and over again, while there is an incredible example of an open-source project that has volunteers spreading it very successfully in all sorts of creative ways. This project, as you may have guessed, is Firefox.
You have probably already heard that Firefox far surpassed their goal and reached over 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in just 24 hours! This is not, by far, though, the only promotional project Firefox has succeeded with. Everything from crop circles to newspaper ads to volunteer “Firefox Campus Reps,” Firefox has tried it. Firefox is easily the most widely recognized open-source project that I can think of. The point is, Firefox is really, really good at promoting itself. Because of this, other open-source projects should look to them as an example of how to spread their software and name. Granted, Firefox has an advantage in that it can be used by anyone, no matter what OS they use, and in that almost everyone uses a web browser, but still, more open-source projects should look to Firefox as a model for good promotion. I don’t mean everyone should copy exactly what Firefox has done, just be inspired by it. If every open-source project followed the example of Firefox and other widely-known open-source projects, my guess is that the number of projects that are common-place names would skyrocket.
June 21st, 2008 at 7:38 pm
OpenOffice.org is another project that everyone can use, like Firefox but almost no one knows about it. The only reason for that is that… well, I never really enjoyed using OOo. I felt like it was clumsy and bulky, and compared to it Office’s Word is so much better and totally worth £60 (or however much it is now). The reason Firefox got so big was because Internet Explorer was crap. And without being big, half the promotional methods that Firefox is using wouldn’t work; they wouldn’t be able to get to that record, they wouldn’t have been able to afford that advert (which was totally donation funded).
As always is with the world, you need to be reasonably big in order to get bigger. And you can only start getting big by having a good product, which the norm can’t compete with.