David M Williams
Sunday, 18 January 2009 18:00
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The contest rules permit as many different submissions as you like, but don’t go over 60 seconds, don’t violate anyone’s intellectual property and don’t be offensive.
Entries close on March 15th and the winner will be selected by a panel of judges who will take into account originality, clarity of message, its inspirational content, and to an extent, the video’s rating on a community web site.
The winner will receive a free trip to Tokyo to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009. The prize includes airfares, hotel accommodation for three nights and conference registration.
Here’s a sample of the wares so far. This
first entry is just penguins about Linux!
Here’s
another but brace yourself; this is pretty cheesy!
Meanwhile, this
third one is pretty slick. It’s French but you should be able to easily work out what’s happening.
The penguin’s parting joke is “Hey girls, do you know what the difference is between a window and an apple? Nothing! Hahaha.”
What do you think? Are you inspired to give it a hit? It would be tremendous to see an iTWire reader win!
Now, what’s all this about a girl dropping out of college and blaming it on Ubuntu? Sadly, it's true, and it shows the need for some good pro-Linux advertising.
Partially, the advertising is necessary to counter the gross fear that still seems to exist for many ordinary folk when encountering anything that’s not Windows.
We’ve seen this just in the previous year where
masses of consumers bought netbooks because they were cheap laptops – and then returned Linux ones in hordes because it was not what they were used to; they decided they would pay the extra Windows tax and negate some of the cost reductions.
Yet, the advertising can also help resolve some of the harm committed – and I hate to say it – by rabidly over-enthusiastic Linux evangelists who forget that the people they are dealing with are, well, people.
A recent example relates to a teacher in Austin, Texas, who confiscated Linux CDs being handed out by a student. She disputed his allegation the software was free, stating “
no software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.”
This lady wrote to The Helios Project, who the pupil obtained the CDs from, to express her aggravations.
Helios blogged about it, the story went viral, and the teacher in question received high levels of abuse and criticism.
Now, it’s one thing to critique another’s point of view, but it’s something totally different to resort to personal harassment, to abuse the individual and most certainly it’s not appropriate to seek them out in “the real world” to vent your spleen.
This happened again this last week; WKOW Television broadcast a regular computer helpline called the 27 News Troubleshooter. They reported
the case of a young lady, Abbie Schubert, who spent $US 1,100 on a Dell laptop to aid her with studies at Madison Area Technical College (MATC) in a course delivered online.
CONTINUED
