OStatic

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.?

Today, I was looking at a couple of interesting news and opinion pieces that made me think of an unfortunate truth that we've written about before: Linux has no marketing. The first piece that got me thinking about this problem was Roger Grimes' post on how the Mac platform is much less frequently targeted by hackers than Windows, because it's much less entrenched. That's even more true for Linux, where users have nowhere near the number of security headaches as Windows users have. The other piece I noticed was this one, which points out that even though the official release of Windows 7--expected to be Microsoft's first hit OS in many years--is three weeks away, it's already running on one in 67 personal computers.

Windows 7 has the potential to close the door on opportunities for Linux-based netbooks, and shut a lot of people out of new opportunities to try open source applications. And yet, I don't doubt that the hackers and crackers will be all over Windows 7, circulating new breeds of malware aimed at it. What if Linux had coordinated marketing behind it, and a targeted advertising campaign made the point that Linux-based netbooks can boot faster and are vastly more secure than Windows netbooks? That just might work, if it weren't a pipe dream.