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 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jae Stutzman Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 4:55 PM To: community Subject: Re: Again: Advertising thoughts Just one thing: the general public doesn't even know the word "Linux". I don't really agree with the stance that Linux is a bad word here and I don't think that it is bad to associate with "Linux". Microsoft has been pushing Windows Mobile for years to try to leverage their so-called easy to use OS as compared with Palm. Not that Linux is the all powerful word to use to get people on board either. But to say that openmoko is built on Linux (or GNU/Linux for the truly hardcore) is generally a positive thing because Linux is the embodiment of open and free in the current computing world. The thing that must be stressed is that the phone is open, not closed, both in speech and in beer. One more thing. I'd agree that people watching TV commercials may not know what Linux is (except for those IBM ads a few years ago). But youtube ads...come on, most have at least heard about that non-Microsoft thing! Jae
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