I found this a little bizarre. It’s on LXer, a Linux News site that tends to feature a lot of Linux zealotry and fanboyism.

But there is a project out there called Tux 500 trying to raise money so that they can have a car race in the Indy 500. Which is all fine and good. People are free to do what they want.

Any sort of exposure is can be helpful. I suppose.

But Linux is not some monolithic mega-corporation that has tons of money that they can just toss around like Microsoft or Oracle can. When these companies sponsor this kind of event, sure, they get a lot of eyes to see their company logo, but what exactly does this mean? Does seeing the Windows icon plastered all over the place really make you want to go out and buy a copy of Vista right now? Does seeing the Apple ensignia compel you to run to your local Apple store to line up now for your copy of Leopard?

Merely painting your logo on a car does not necessarily equal mindshare.

Good marketing is well-targeted and specific. You don’t see RedHat or Novell or any of the other big distros putting out TV ads because their money isn’t made from home users. In fact, I don’t see how you could possibly make money from home users, because they can download a distro for free off of the Net. What Linux companies target is the enterprise, and while random exposure could possibly catch the attention of some CIO out there who likes car racing, wouldn’t it be wiser for them to just go to the events and conferences where they can specifically target the CIOs who would be making OS and app decisions for their company? Getting a huge company to switch is likely to provide much more exposure than the twenty seconds that a blurry version of the Linux penguin will be flashed on the screen during the race.

Now the Open Source world has room for all kinds of people. There are the corporations out there interested in selling a good enterprise solution. There are the power users, the hackers, the crackers, the nerds, the masochists. There are the zealots and the fanboys. The guys who won’t settle for anything less than a free-as-in-speech OS. The folks who just want a decent desktop environment that lets you do all the things a Windows machine can do without all the blue-screens-of-death or all the Big-Brother pop-up dialog-boxes, and still cost nothing. The people who want Linux to take over the world. The demographic of Linux users probably cuts across all political ideologies, all religions, all nationalities, and so on.

But, c’mon. You can’t tell me that Free Software wasn’t built entirely on so-called Haight-Ashbury, Abbie Hoffman idealism (the turns of phrases utilized by a post addressing critics of the Tux 500 project.) Just read the freakin’ GPL. Meditate on the fact that without Richard Stallman, none of this would’ve ever have happened. Say what you will, but the ‘60s counter-culture has done much more to change the world than the Indy 500 ever will.

If you really want to give your money away to a cause that will allow you to continue using your computer without having to pony up $300 to Microsoft every five years or so (not adjusted for inflation), I think your money would be much better spent supporting the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Donate to Groklaw and stop MS from spreading their FUD.

If you’re really interested in making Linux a better desktop environment, help work on GNOME or KDE or XFCE.

The real draw to particular OS platforms are the apps it supports. If you want more apps worth running, why not participate in Google Summer of Code?

(For a more scathing criticism of the Tux 500 project, read ”and now for something completely stupid”)