I was privileged to be invited to speak on open source at Videnskabsministeriets IT Arkitekturkonference (The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation) this last Thursday in Århus. Those who attended my speech at Open Source Days 2008 will know that I have some points but my delivery can be lacking; I managed to overcome that this time with a bit of preparation. A video of the speech is embedded after the jump.

In the course of writing a little python command line RSS engine, I naturally came to a point where I needed to download the RSS feeds to store them and work with them.

My options looked like this:

• Use urllib2.urlopen which would download the feeds serially. When you have hundreds of feeds in your opml file, that takes too long. Besides, what do I have ADSL for?
• Use Twisted. But, my application is not a web app and frankly, switching the whole thing over to the Twisted event-driven model is overkill and unnecessarily complicated.
• Use wget with threads. The problem with that would have been that I'd have to jump through hoops to pass the data from the threads back to the main application, possibly with messy kludges like temporary files. No thanks!
• Use libcurl through the pycurl library. Ah, yes, perfect. Or so I thought.

Open Source Startup Marketing: Initial Steps

As innovative open source startups gradually grow ambitious enough to start thinking about an enterprise-class client portfolio, marketing becomes more of a pressing priority. My observation is that marketing is overwhelmingly regarded by open source geeks (an accolade I aspire to myself despite my sub-standard code-fu) as either superfluous nonsense-ridden hand waving, as arcane dark arts taught only in the bowels of the netherworld, or somewhere in between.

For a smaller open source startup, it doesn't have to fall into either category. It can be simple and straightforward, and that is what I have written this article for: to reduce the dimensions of kickstarting the marketing function for an open source startup by emphasizing on key areas with disproportionately emphatic results. More bang for your unit of effort. Less of a marketing department, and more of an image and a strategy for how to access the enterprise client market.

Think of this as an "We're a small open source startup and we're all arsekicking engineers, but it looks like we need to market if we're going to attract lucrative clients" HOWTO.

Following up to that last presentation, I've uploaded here the slide deck I used to deliver a training workshop at the Sanabel 2007 conference in Sanaa, Yemen.

CC licensed again, ppt for the usual reasons.