Linux (+OSS/FS) Advocacy Suggestion: "shut up"?
 

Been zoning out on youtube and ran across those mac commercial spoofs everyone but me knows about right...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-L-0s-7-Z0
... yes, it's a joke but this is really how those mainstream guys see us. The one about e-mail makes a point too.

We like to rave on about how great linux is.

But imagine you've just spent all day hunting down a product, find it, and part with important parts of your anatomy to possess it... then you get home and someone tells you that you could have got it for a couple of bucks down the street, but you don't need it anyway because there's something that does the same thing and does the ironing for free...?

Don't you feel like decking the guy?

Being true only makes you feel worse!

We really need to be considered more like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVOnFdMf0RU
... or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkFQVcl62qo

(I like the second one for the small dig about how "PC" and "Mac" are not OS's...)

Here we just cruise around being competent and the others come to us. The time to sell is when someone is actually buying. When they are interested.

I remember using my Ubuntu lappy in a cafe... people would ask me how I got the desktop to look like that. Not often, but often enough that I ended up carrying a couple of CD's in my bag.

Even better - have you seen Bruce Schneier's blog? Of course you have... http://www.schneier.com/blog/

The articles, essays, etc. are full of open source endorsements of a kind we don't normally see. Non-political, in a reasoned tone.

Perhaps we need to calm down and STFU?

I'll agree that we do need to be less annoying (less invasive) about our advocacy, but it is important that people know they have a choice. They should know they are not trapped into one insecure environment.