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New Contest Will Seek the Best "I'm Linux" Video

Posted by kdawson on from the dust-off-directors'-chairs-and-hats dept.

LinuxScribe writes "From Apple's ubiquitous 'I'm a Mac,' to Jerry Seinfeld, to Microsoft's 'I'm a PC' retort, operating system commercials have been flooding the airways. Except that Linux is the one OS that has been notably absent. Now the Linux Foundation is launching a video contest on their new video site to fill this void. The winner gets a trip to Tokyo next year to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium, and some serious geek cred." The contest doesn't officially open until late January; the blog post has an email address to contact if you want to get a head start.

2 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. The contest is over. by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Informative

    IBM Won.

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
  2. Don't advertise "Linux", advertise a BRAND by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Linux" per se is not an OS, it is a set of common libraries and standards that is shared by many OSs. Heck, binaries compiled for one Linux distro won't even work on half the others (reason I mentioned this is because binary incompatibility is a good way to distinguish between customizations of a single OS, as opposed to different OSs, which, while belonging to the same family, are just that - DIFFERENT OSs.

    Advertising Linux is like advertising x86 architecture or the Unix Standard. It may be useful for engineers, programmers, or adiministrators, but not to end users. The fact that all Linux distros share the same kernel is about as useful to end users as telling them that their particular Chevy model uses the same engine block as a dozen other cars from GM. The service technician will need to know this, not the end user. The end users need to know WHAT a distro does, not HOW it does it. And every distro does things differently, and for a good reason - it is optimized for a particular audience and a particular way of doing things. By definition, that means that a single distro can't please eveyone - and shouldn't try to.

    Advertise Ubuntu. Advertise Red Hat. Advertise Gentoo. Pick a market and promote the Linux brand that suits that market best. And if someone else isn't happy about your choice, they can go and advertise their own distro to their own target audience.

    Linux distros need to start adopting a good old capitalist trick known as USING A BRAND.