You keep trying to impose these "basic principles" on things you don't understand, but seem to be determined to think they do.technodup":rjp4vp7v said:A need recognised; a solution created and product distributed to the end user. You keep using examples of successful marketing to demonstrate an absence of marketing. Which is either strange, stupid or you don't get the basic principles.Neil":rjp4vp7v said:And it's not all just some end product - it's people collaborating to understand - much of it is development of OSs like Linux, Android - people collaborating to understand, make something work, write a driver for something that's not currently there, and contribute it to the rest of the community.
Something like Linux, wasn't a triumph for marketing back when it first became real - even though it's probably heavily used in the commercial world, now.
It was a triumph for community. It didn't get the collaboration because of any marketing principles - it got it for reasons of not being restricted by the market or propreitary software, curiosity and the desire to solve puzzles. THAT'S the difference - open source taps into a different aspect - curiosity.
You'd try and fit some rather more normal "marketing" type spin and concepts to it, so you can understand it within your frame of reference - but that's simply because you don't properly understand why open source gets done - all you see is final products like OpenOffice and why people use it, and think you can define them as a rationale based on that - but that's a very limited slice of it, and an completely unrepresentative take on why people contribute to and create open source software.