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Thinking Behind the Business of Sustainable Open Source Software

Open source realizes countless benefits for those who participate in it. The (GPL) licensing model offers a pay it forward promise that demands responsibility and integrity. As users, customers, industry stakeholders and peers all take their seats at the table, what must we do to create value for our market, in a sustainable way?

By design, in this community we all wear various hats concurrently as we address problems for both clients, and ourselves but the tradeoffs that we’ve all chosen to accept can be improved. Let’s take a look:

  • Excellence vs. Activity:
    Excellence is where sustainability lives, it’s the place where efforts feel and are actually rewarding for customers and entrepreneurs. Activity is the place where progress begins, you need both and they are not interchangeable. Get active achieving excellence.
  • Understanding the Market Need:
    There are several solutions to common problems because there are countless points of view and circumstances change over time. Understand the ebb and flow and work towards a principled approach to addressing the need.
  • Creating a Market Need:
    Some niches are obvious others are not. Some ambitions you have may not yet have a market. Position yourself as a leader by creating a track record and go from there.
  • Get in Where You Fit in:
    There will always be seemingly competing points of view for addressing a need in the market. That’s fine because choice is good and competition helps drive innovation. However, we must be careful to make sure that the problems we attempt solve fully addresses the market need before leading it to greener pastures. Market feedback (network effect) often provides the confirmation of this.
  • Communication:
    What will always be the most difficult requirement for success; communication is what allows us each to focus where our talents are best utilized and allows us to avoid time sinks and misdirection. The balance of various parties solving the same problems concurrently and instead choosing where the limits of their projects are or even better, learning to co-create will help us ramp up our rate of innovation and value creation.

All of this matters because when we do it right, those who follow after us will have better stuff to play with, more effort will be spent on addressing the need than preparing to address the need; that’s innovation. We have to move past remixing and rehashing the same steps required to create a business and focus as a community on commoditizing the tools that let the part time publisher AND the part time developer alike, focus on what they are passionate about using WordPress as the tool.

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Frederick Townes

Frederick Townes was the Founding Chief Technical Officer of Mashable, one of the top independent media sites worldwide and is currently the Senior Technical Advisor. As a search / social media marketer and WordPress consultant, Frederick’s projects typically include WordPress as a core element. One of his largest contributions to the WordPress community was his web performance optimization framework W3 Total Cache. He is also a serial web entrepreneur and technologist. One of his recent projects, W3 MARKUP, launched in 2007, was acquired after only 11 short months prior to his moving to Florence, Italy in 2008.

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