“Hardly. But as the lovey-dovey Linux business matures, elbows
are beginning to fly.”
“The hardcore geeks chuckled when the prizes were passed out
near the end of the June Bay Area Linux Users Group meeting.
LinuxCare, a fast-growing start-up specializing in support for the
Linux-based operating system, was giving away free copies of a
perky promotional poster featuring a naked woman guarding her
buttocks with a Debian Linux CD-ROM. The point being, of course,
that if you choose to purchase LinuxCare support services, you’ve
covered your ass.”
“The poster was a parody of this spring’s notorious Simply Palm
advertising campaign for the Palm V handheld computer. But the
geeks weren’t giggling at the naked lady. Instead, they were
appreciating a more subtle stab of humor: a LinuxCare dig at Red
Hat, the U.S. market leader in packaged Linux distributions. Just
three weeks earlier, at the Linux Expo in North Carolina in late
May, LinuxCare had earned Red Hat’s ire by distributing copies of a
similar poster that displayed a Red Hat CD-ROM.”