Marketing open source

Microsoft is the most successful software company on Earth. Does it owe its success to better engineering? I hear the masses of netizens ROFLing. Besides, they acquired most of the software that they sell. No, Microsoft owes its success to excellent marketing - too good even for their own good but that's another story.

In general, a for-profit company spends a sizable amount of money on advertising. In today's hyper-mediated world - it's a cliché but it's true - people have their minds filled with brands, so much so that good things that don't have a brand tend to become forgotten.

Take milk as a counter-example. The highly successful Got Milk? campaign stuck in everyone's mind and increased sales for all milk manufacturers. Open source needs the same approach. This will only happen when major FOSS players (FSF, GNU, Mozilla, Apache, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.) agree on a message to be delivered to the world, commission a kick-ass advertising agency (big or small doesn't matter, as long as it projects the goodness of FOSS) and in general pay some big bucks to work to reverse the popular perception: immature, for geeks only, not reliable, etc. Just as Wikipedia was able to raise $6M, I am sure such a campaign could be partially funded by netizens themselves.