What Social Media (And the World) Owes to Open Source

It’s not just about technology. And perhaps one of the reasons why the principles are getting lost is the cultural gap between tech communities and the organizations they serve. But the principles are not just about tech. I mean this in two ways. First, the principles of open source are not just restricted to technology projects; they can be applied — and have been applied, even before the OS movement got its name — to almost any market that depends on an ecosystem of different players. Second — and this is something that so many tech-marketers and non-tech social media marketers ignore, forget, or never quite got: the principles don’t just apply to online engagement, but offline as well.