Marketing and promotion is just as costly, if not more costly, than it ever was. I know too many wonderful open source projects that failed and left their author bitter because they thought that merely creating a great program was good enough.

The "build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood fantasy. Even the Beatles went nowhere until they hooked up with promoter George Martin.

> The "build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood fantasy.

So incredibly true.

And even whenever I do try and talk about my software, people usually perceive it as an attack on competing software (you can't say why someone should use your product without implicitly stating why they shouldn't use someone else's); or as shameless self-promotion and advertising (even though it's all FOSS) =(