[mdlug] An Idea inspired by....

[Ron Blanchett]

I recently had an idea that was inspired by a few of the things that I have been reading
over the last few months. The first of which was the paper by Eric Raymond & Rob Landley
entitled "World Domination 201" [1], the second being a Blog post by Helios [2], and the
third being a comment to Helios' blog post and its expanded ideas [3]. Keep in mind that my
idea is not originally mine but is an expansion of someone else's idea.

My idea could help the FOSS community in many ways but the first of which I believe to be in
advertising it biggest piece of software, Linux.  Before I get to my idea I would like to start with
some background on the ideas presented by the three things that inspired my thinking.
The first of which is Eric and Rob's paper WD201, in it I beieve that Eric and Rob are trying
to point out to the FOSS community that they need to pick one battle and win it instead of trying
to win an entire war all at one. The battle that they are referring to is Desktop Domination for Linux.
And the overall 'war' (for lack of a better term) they refer to is the overall adoption of FOSF (free and open source formats).
Helios further expands on this idea in his blog post by pointing out a few of the things that the user
community can do to help win this battle and even examples of things that he is doing to help. A reader
of this blog brings up the idea in a comment and is his own blog of creating a series of videos  to be posted
to places like YouTube to help Linux gain desktop domination.

All of these things tied together in my mind with the culmination of the idea to setup a few video booths at 
Penguicon in April to record peoples statements on why they switched to Linux. I believe that these videos could be
done to the tune of a satire of the Apple Switch commercials. To be successful the switch type videos need
to be as vendor/distro neutral as possible and really only need to state why the person giving there reason
for switching switched from Windows to Linux. This idea can also be further expanded upon to include a
few satires of current Apple vs. WinTel PC's commercials with a us doing a similar type of commercial that
replaces the Apple PC with a Linux PC or maybe adds in a Linux PC along with the other.

I am not a videographer or writer so I am posting this here to both garner interest and to try to find people that can help
with this enddever. I have a video camera that can be used but to make this work I think we would need more than
one video booth setup for people to use. I would also like to find some people that would like to help create the commercial
that is a satire of the recent Apple commercials and also some people to act out this commercial.

After Penguicon all of the footage will be cut into individual commercials and posted to the web in a low quality format on YouTube
and similar site to become as viral I hope as the LN2 video from this past Penguicon. The videos will also
be made available in high quality for LUG's to use as promotional material via either a CD/DVD ISO download and/or a torrent seed.

If any one is interested in helping with this project and collaborating with me on it please let me know ASAP as we will
need to start working on this very soon for it to be ready to be done at Penguicon this April.


Thanks for all the fish,
-Ron

[1]: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
[2]: http://blog.lobby4linux.com/index.php?/archives/91-OK,-Heads-Up-Linux,-Youre-on-in-5..4..3..2-cue-music....html
[3]: http://upgrade2linux.blogspot.com/