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Open Source and the Long Tail
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Bernard Golden recently turned Clarise and I onto a series of articles documenting Chris Anderson's talk at the Churchill Club, "The Long Tail: Finding New Markets in the Niches".
It's interesting that Chris Anderson brings up Open Source at the end of the fifth and final part of the talk. Open Source is all about niches, and making a niche work as a market is all about community. And as we all know, succeeding with an Open Source project depends upon building the community around it.
Open Source is very much D.I.Y. There are over 100,000 projects listed with SourceForge. These projects provide the framework to have software do exactly what you need it to do for your niche. One problem is to break out of the D.I.Y. crowd of programmers, and bring these wonderful capabilities to those who need it most, the SMB market. Those niche businesses run by creative individuals who definitely don't have the time, and may not have the desire to customize an Open Source project to do what they need. We're striving to solve this problem in a variety of ways.
But more about that another time.
Technorati Tags: Business, Open Source
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