O'Reilly: Open Source Visibility

"The past few weeks have seen me out and about visiting various large companies here in Germany and talking about the open source work we do (mostly to do with Apache Cocoon and related projects). Working in this area has given me some interesting insights into the relationships between customers and 'suppliers' (meaning software companies like ourselves).

"Two years ago when we started on this interesting journey, we were faced with having to argue why we use and work on open source software: 'if it's free then it can't be any good'. Now, we are often met with the comment of 'oh, we use that here as well'. So the times have definitely changed.

"On the other hand it still surprises me, how low the profile of open source solutions such as Cocoon actually is. Once you get the possibility of actually being able to speak on and demonstrate what these open source projects are capable of, you can really see the wheels starting to turn in the heads of the people attending. But it's getting 'in' that is really still the problem..."

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