But any Ad guy who clones the Mad Men silhouette, and who’s probably wondering if the Drapers really WILL get divorced, is fine by me.

Unfortunately for every big name, successful open source play – there are 1,000’s of projects in SourceForge which will never ever make it big. Take it from someone who’s got over 1M lines of code, $4M invested and….

Well at least I created my own license – so I can still CHARGE for source – to those evil CAPITALISTS who want to EXPLOIT my code.

I just call it “source code available” – to stay out of the debate if we’re REALLY open source.

And while we’re at it – lets not forget open ideas, open data, open standards and open sesame. On rye. With crackers.

I often preach the value of trademarks to clients who come to me seeking patent protection and your post reinforced my belief that a strong trademark can be more valuable than a patent in many circumstances. The beauty of a trademark is that it lasts forever and its value typiclly increases over time, while a patent is for a limited time and its value decreases over time. In the Mozilla example, the source code for Firefox has little or no value because anyone can take it and use it. However, people recognize and trust the Firefox brand and, even though a competing browser might use the same code and even have more or better features, people will still be more likley to use Firefox becuase they know it and trust it.

Naturally the perspective is from branding and advertising, but it’d be interesting to hear some analysis of how different open source licenses alter the equation — how business models differ with more conservative licenses like the GPL versus more liberal ones, like MIT. Creative Commons is a whole other can of worms for artistic works, as you touched on.

Linux on the desktop still has a long way to go, but in the server market, there have been forays into shaping business models for many years now, with varying degrees of success. Red Hat is probably the strongest example. Though consulting expertise, support and supporting products are their core products, they’ve been fairly successful at establishing and protecting a brand as well. There is a lot of potential for comparative analysis with Novell’s representation of the SUSE Linux distribution in the enterprise world.

A big story now is the buyout of Sun, probably the largest open source success in the world, by proprietary database vendor Oracle. Many question the fate of MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database which Sun acquired last year and didn’t handle very well, but Sun is also the primary backer of a multitude of other important OS projects.

The subject of security flaws in the Android case is a touchy one for a number of reasons, but the open source argument (one that can be tough sell for some) is that the transparency actually improves security. More eyes on the code to find vectors of exploitation, more hands on deck to quickly fix flaws that have been discovered. If a closed-source vendor discovers an exploit and doesn’t publicize it, attackers may already know about it, and it may be a long while before an official security patch is released. Security by obscurity is a weak model. From a branding perspective though, I’m no expert, but I think I’d agree that Google has had a tough time of it. They have to toe the line between branding a code framework that excites developers, and branding a mobile platform that excites consumers.

Mozilla Firefox is really the most interesting case for your argument here, and it could probably be expanded into a lengthy article of its own. I know a bit about the Mozilla Foundation’s work to establish and protect the brand, but I’d love to hear more from an agency perspective about the their strategies, policies and guidelines, and how those work alongside the open source software product.
This is a bit random, but on the political note, I saw a presentation on the tech and activism behind an interesting project at BarCamp Boston a couple of weeks ago:

http://civx.us

It’s not too pretty at this point, but they’ve gotten a lot done on aggregating available public info from sometimes hard-to-find places.