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.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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motters
2 years 32 weeks 3 days 23 hours ago
Some heavy FUD
I agree that Linux needs better marketing. Most computer users don't use Linux simply because they're unaware of its existance, or they don't know anything more about it beyond its name.
The comments for that article seem to contain a lot of FUD-meistering by anonymous people clearly biased in favour of Microsoft (are they Microsoft employees perchance?). The usual nonsense about Linux being hard to use seems to be being peddled, and because of lack of positive marketing the naive reader can only assume that these statements are correct.
Perhaps there needs to be some Linux equivalent of the "get the facts" campaign, in order to dispell the now very tired and erroneous myths originating from Redmond.