In a recent post I wrote called "Linux has no marketing, but what if it did?" I made the point that with Microsoft's Windows 7 OS coming out on October 22nd, there will be a blitz of marketing around it, and noted that there never is any such blitz promoting Linux. That post suggested that if Linux could have an equivalent marketing blitz, a very effective campaign might be built around how very much more secure and out of the line of fire of malware purveyors Linux is.

It's non-accidental that the spammers and crapware purveyors go after the top operating systems and applications on them in order of the OS installed bases: Windows (a lot), Mac OS (a little bit), Linux (hardly at all). Now, a Washington Post story is taking over where the Linux marketers never seem to tread and recommending Linux for online banking--for tighter security than Windows can provide.

The Software Freedom Law Center and Red Hat's CEO rag on the patent system. "Nobody can write software without risking a lawsuit."

Ingres goes after Sun's customers. The company is promoting a migration path from the MySQL database.

Apple's iPhone now has one-third the market share of desktop Linux. NetApplications measured how much Linux and the iPhone are used to access the Internet.

FOSS sexism claims stir up the pot. Bruce Byfield's recent article on the topic has people talking.

ARMing desktop Linux. ARM-based netbooks are on their way and they can't run Windows.

Reading Sam Dean's piece on the absence of linux marketing brought back memories, many of them painful, of my involvement in Linux International, back in the day. For you kids today who only know your Linux Foundation, Linux International (LI) was founded by Jon 'maddog' Hall as a vendor-driven organization to, among other things, protect the Linux trademark. One of LI's initiatives that began in early 2000 was a marketing plan to be jointly funded by the vendors. You can read my call to action from that time begging and pleading for the members of LI to band together to do *something*.

Then, as now, the problem was the cacaphony of noise from various vendors, each with their own spin on Linux. Was it a desktop thing as Eazel and Ximian proclaimed at the time? Was it an enterprise dark horse as backed by IBM? Was it a really great web server, as VA Linux and Red Hat were promoting? All of the above? While multiple Linux markets have continued to grow since then, there does not appear to be a solution to the general problem.