\hypertarget{archetype:mass-market}{}

\subsection{Mass Market}\label{archetype:mass-market}

{\bf Examples:} \emph{Firefox, LibreOffice, MediaWiki (due to Wikipedia instance)}

{\bf Characteristics:} Mass Market projects are often similar to

``Wide Open'' projects, but they necessarily have a protective layer

around their contribution intake process. This is because there are

simply too many users and too many opinions for everyone to be heard

by the development team, and because the average technical

sophistication of the users is low (especially in terms of their

familiarity with the conventions of open source participation). This is

especially true in a commercial context where product experience and

time-to-market are highly sensitive.

Like B2B, Mass Market tends to drive down the price of directly

competitive products, the way OpenOffice.org (and later LibreOffice)

did with Microsoft Office. But Mass Market is less likely than B2B to

affect complementary products, because Mass Market is usually aimed at

individuals not at intermediary organizations.

Mass Market open source projects have certain opportunities that come

with economies of scale, and they should actively seek to take

advantage of those opportunities. For example, they can often get

good translation (i.e., localization) coverage, because there are many

users who are qualified and motivated to perform translation even

though they might not have the skills to participate as programmers.

Mass Market projects can do effective A/B testing and user surveys,

and have some ability to influence \foreignphrase{de facto} or formal

Internet and Web standards. Finally, they can be thought leaders in a

broader political sense (e.g., through industry partnerships, user

clubs, etc).

Mass Market might at first seem more like a description of an end

product than of a project archetype, but in fact there are important

ways in which being Mass Market has implications for how the project

is run. With developer-oriented software, it usually pays to listen

to the most vocal customers. But Mass Market projects are oriented

mainly toward non-technical users, and thus should be guided more by

explicit user research.

% (ref:b7de5e0a)

\begin{itemize}

\item {\bf Licensing}: Non-copyleft generally, but may be copyleft

depending on the project's business strategy.

\item {\bf Community standards}: Fully open, but relatively brusque

for the vast majority of users. Because of the large number of

users, these projects evolve toward a users-helping-users pattern,

rather than the development team serving as user support. The team

itself can often seem somewhat distant or unresponsive.

\item {\bf Component coupling}: Mix and match packages. This

archetype can support a number of different component packaging

techniques.

\item {\bf Main benefits}: Large user base can help the project be

broadly influential.

\item {\bf Typical governance}: Technical committee and/or formal

committer group.

\end{itemize}