Again: Advertising thoughts

Jae Stutzman jaebird at gmail.com
Mon Jul 16 02:39:56 CEST 2007


On 7/15/07, Richard Reichenbacher <richard5 at email.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
>  You need to think about the average everyday human being here.  If you've
> ever worked help desk you might have a general understanding of how very
> little your average person knows about computers.  Hell even most of the IT
> people I've worked with had little to no  idea what Linux is all about.  So
> when advertising to the mass market, saying that it's based on GNU/Linux
> means absolutely nothing to these people.  The more complicated it sounds to
> them, the less likely they are to buy it.
>
>
>
> One of the most alluring things about the iPhone is that you can give it
> to ANYBODY and within minutes they will be able to use just about every
> feature of the phone, even if there aren't all that many.  If this phone is
> going to make it in the real world then it needs to be useable and enjoyable
> to use, by everyone from Linus Torvalds himself, to Joe Bloe the milkman
> that never owned a cell phone before in his life and it needs to marketed
> the same way.  Just about everyone in the open source community already
> knows about OpenMoko and what it's capable of, next step is letting the rest
> of the world know.
>
>
>
> Richard
>

I agree that it needs to be usable, of course. But part of the issue is that
there needs to be some consumer education as well. The openmoko project can
be an ambassador of the FOSS world to Joe consumer. If the argument is that
the average person doesn't know what Linux is, then openmoko can
demonstrated it. What is the point of all this anyways: promoting freedom.
The consumer isn't an idiot, although MS would want us all to believe it. If
you don't like Linux use "Powered by FOSS". But don't believe the FUD.

If we don't get the message out, we are doing all of ourselves a disservice
in the long run.

Jae
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