Roger Dingledine (arma@seul.org) of the SEUL project writes:
Recently, it's become apparent that more and more Linux advocacy documents are springing up, but their creation and development remains uncoordinated. All of you have written or maintain a well-written and insightful document related to Linux advocacy. There are many such documents out there; while many of them start out very thorough and up to date, it's very difficult to maintain that after the initial copy is finished and released. Seul has such a document (http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html) -- it started out really good, but it's slowly getting out of date. That seems to be the case for a lot of other documents I've seen. I'd like to gather together some good writers and good thinkers, and figure out what needs to be done wrt Linux advocacy documents. At the least, we should come up with a list of the current good documents that are available, possibly with commentary on each. We should notify those people I haven't noticed yet, and try to help people become more sychronized and aware of our efforts. I'd like this to be a group of people who generally all agree on what advocacy means, and what the good and bad aspects of Linux are -- discussion of the best way to present issues is great, but debate on the issues themselves will slow us down a lot. As such, it will be a closed group, and people can join by invitation. The next step would be to figure out which categories need to be covered: a list of the pros and cons of using Linux is very different from a list of common myths and counter-arguments to them, is very different from a list of anecdotes or press articles describing Linux successes. We need to come up with one or a few documents in each category, and make sure they remain comprehensive and timely. I have several goals in mind. First of all, we should provide (either write or collect) a set of comprehensive and clear documents to help guide Linux advocates, in terms of good arguments to make and good ways to present them. These same documents would also be very beneficial from the point of view of the press, because there would finally be a good place to look to get "the answer" in terms of why Linux is better, or why a particular claim about Windows isn't as reasonable as it sounds. (Indeed, this implies that maybe we should contact places with misleading advocacy and try to guide them to the light. But that gets much trickier.) And of course, the documents would be useful for new users or companies considering switching to Linux. I can help out with some of the leadership for this (and particularly the 'vision' side, though I expect quite a few of us have a strong vision), but it would be nice if some others wanted to help out with leadership. (Perhaps we would end up splitting it by category, though there will be some overlap. My preference is in the "Why Linux?" direction; I also expect that we will have to ignore some categories, because other people are already dealing with them better than we can.) Anyway, if you're interested in helping out to make this happen, even if you just have some spare time to help edit what other people come up with, please contact me. Once I've gotten some responses, I'll set up a list for discussion (private list, publically archived) and send out another note with a pointer to the list. Thanks for your time. Comments greatly appreciated, --Roger Dingledine, SEUL project leader Following is a slightly outdated list of some of the advocacy docs I've run across so far. It's in no particular order, and far from complete. http://www.linux-center.org/en/politics/index.html http://www.flash.net/~landley/linux/index.htm http://www.croftj.net/~goob/local/why.html http://www.seul.org/docs/whylinux.html http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/fud2.html http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hills/9267/sstactics.html http://www.KenAndTed.com/KensBookmark/linux/index.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue25/sorensen.html http://electriclichen.com/people/dmarti/linuxmanship.html http://www.xunil.com/xunil/j4phases.html http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Advocacy.html http://www.10mb.com/linux/ http://www.mwsoftware.com/linux/whylinux.html http://www.linuxos.org/Why-Linux.html http://www.ncworldmag.com/ncworld/ncw-04-1998/ncw-04-nextten.html http://www.jimmo.com/Linux-NT_Debate/index.html http://www2.computerworld.com/home/print9497.nsf/All/SL42migrat1692A http://mnemo.mcs.muohio.edu/computing/linux/advocacy/ http://www.opensource.org/for-suits.html http://www.redhat.com/redhat/reasons-for-linux.html http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/index.html http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/6087/ http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~conradp/linux/pr/ http://www.opensource.org/faq.html http://directory.mozilla.org/Computers/Systems/Linux/Advocacy/