Just got off the shuttle flight from Boston and LinuxWorld Expo. Came away with the thought that if the suits were in charge of marketing religion, we'd have no faith-based wars, anti-semitism, or Christian vs. Muslim conflicts. The reason? Because the suits would market religion like they market technology. They would all use the exact same buzzwords and marketing vehicles. Any religion would become indistinguishable from other religions.
LinuxWorld is a prime example of the mob psychology of marketing technology, despite the roots of Lunix being far more fanatical than anything in technology today. They take something like Linux and the industry built up around it and agree to use the same innocuous terms like integration, agility, ROI, and many many others. One could walk the floor this morning and play a very entertaining game of buzzword bingo, albeit a short game because you'd hit all the words after only the first three booths you passed.
Marketing open source technology can't simply be put into same old software marketing model from the commercial world. It should not shy away from it's almost religious roots just to fit into some comfortable way of marketing we're used to. Keeping those cheesy impersonators (Donald Trump lookalike hawking load balancing software) out of unemployment is an honorable cause, but lets keep it out of marketing open source now and maybe try and market in a manner similar to how it was born and continues to evolve.
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