Why Open Source Software Developers are Good Marketers

I have been trying to digest two unrelated stories from last week. The first was the report by the Standish Group on the $60 Billion dollars open source is purported to be costing the proprietary software industry. The second was Steve Reubel’s, “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid“. As I looked introspectively into these stories I wondered how relevant they were. I came to a realization that why the one of the most commonly espoused virtues of open source is more eyeballs generating better code that perhaps one of the least mentioned strengths is their marketing ability. Bear with me as try to explain why.