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Marketing shows that a project has some money behind it, which is a good sign it's going to be supported for a while, which allays the biggest fear most people
by kyllo 12y ago
Marketing shows that a project has some money behind it, which is a good sign it's going to be supported for a while, which allays the biggest fear most people and organizations have when selecting an open source tool: "is it abandonware?"
- mattgreenrocks 12y agoI guess actually evaluating the project itself is completely out of the question? Or you could, you know, adopt it and continue it? The idea that the technical excellence of open source is secondary to it's marketing/influence is toxic at it's core, and reflects yet another way that developer culture has been infected by Business. Developers focus more on amassing influence than raw skills. We're told to work on 'important' open source projects (remember when everyone fell over themselves to say they contributed to Rails?) and to jump on bandwagons. We're exhorted to take Github stars and activity streaks seriously (lol). And we're told that we can never do enough marketing for our open source projects, that we should buy domain names, blog about it, write more documentation, do bugfixes in a speedy fashion, speak, and maintain social media handles. This will only get worse over time, because we're all convinced we have to amass influence. We're literally working ourselves to death for a few values stored in a database.