Attention for uBlock AFAICT started with a widely shared blog post comparing its performance to other Adblockers. From there on it's probably word of mouth, but writing that blog post and getting attention to it was "marketing", even if maybe not intended that way. And it was good marketing, since tech loves "This thing is proven to be sooo much faster than the old thing people don't love 100%" stories ;)
VLC was (is?) written about extensively by blogs like Lifehacker. It's one of the most recommended programs on forums. I'm surr it started by the creators letting people know about it.
> Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software.
The comments in response to my post have been about the author's of said software publishing blogs - are you really equating 1 author publishing a blog with the 'marketing and sales' used to sell proprietary software (as in dedicated sales team, dedicated marketing teams, SEO, dedicated social media/pr employees)?
> Postgres is very heavily marketed by EnterpriseDB.
Saying that Postgres is 'very heavily marketed' when drawing a comparison to the marketing proprietary software receives isn't just misleading, it's false.