Selling to Developers [audio]

I can't recall every bit of the podcast but these are a few points that were mentioned —

- In the past five years, developers have gained a nontrivial influence in purchasing decisions of enterprises.

- Developers look forward to buying tools that they can use. They are, more or less, unmotivated by marketing talk.

- The business model of selling support and maintenance / services over a fully open source core (RedHat, MySQL) is not a usually a great idea. Both of those companies took a long time to built their Open Source base.

- The better approach is to have parts of your product open source while still having significant benefits to up-sell.

- The best B2D companies would the ones that can execute sales on two levels — the developers who will be the end-user of the product, and head of IT departments (like, CIOs).

- Open source is likely a great marketing tool for selling to developers but it should be regarded as an important one — more precisely, your best engineers should work on your open source core, instead of your proprietary product. (I have personally seen companies focusing on doing open source only in a shoddy way).