Comment of the Day - October 14, 2005 Responding to the Ugly Penguin

NoDough:

OK, I've been wondering about this for about a year now.

[HYPERLINK@lxer.com]
Follow the above link, pull up the full story, scroll down toward the bottom and look at the photo of the ugly penguin. This penguin shows up on hundreds of eWeek pages, and is it ugly!

So here are my questions for your consideration.

- Through the selection of this ugly bird, is eWeek (and, by extension, Ziff Davis) showing open animus toward Linux? The alternatives that occur to me are journalistic incompetence or extremely bad taste.

- Is this type of image damaging to the Linux community?



- If it is animus or if it damages the Linux image, how should the community react? Ignore it? Flame the editor? A kind letter? A campaign?

There are other examples of this, and I wonder how we as a community should react.



tadelste:

NoDough: I believe I share your disgust with subliminal messages in the environment used to disparage the honest efforts of the Linux community.

Before I saw this post, I had made a list of items I contemplated including in an article about Microsoft's alter-egos like the Citizens Against Government Waste, the BSA, Political Action Committes, etc. I laid out the connections to Microsoft sponsored Foundations possibly involved in the money laundering schemes for which authorities have indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

I also wanted to bring in the potential infractions of the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act which seems applicable to Microsoft's admitted $180 million slush fund to squash Linux in foreign Government.

Which ones do we choose?Which ones do we go after? Who do we mobilize? Where do the financial resources originate?

Then I thought about all the settlements for anti-trust that Microsoft has paid. The numbers stagger ones imagination. For example, a little over a decade ago, if you installed Windows 3.1 and you used Digital Research's Dr. DOS, a message came up and said Windows didn't work with Dr. DOS. Microsoft paid dearly for that. And this week we heard that Microsoft paid a huge settlement to Real Networks much like they did Sun Microsystems.

When you settle for billions of dollars in case after case after case, that sort of brands one as a perpetrator.



It seems that no one really cares. People have grown an extra skin. I bought a plane once and learned to fly. I much prefer that to traveling on commercial airlines. But, the vast majority of people would rather take a drink or a Zanax and sit in a cramped seat and not have to learn about aerodynamics.

In my opinion, the best way to deal with these myriad problems lies in making this publication a voice with which to be reckoned. LXer has accomplished remarkable goals in less than two years from scratch. Last month our hits jumped to 3 million from the previous month's 2 million. In November of 2004, we had hits of 783 thousand.

Rather than scatter our attention, help build this publication and have people say, "we're releasing Ubuntu in the morning, let's publish it on Lxer." I know that you won't see any Microsoft advertisements here. They cannot buy us.