[Bradford] The BBC and Ubuntu

[Andrea Ryan]

I don't know if any of you saw BBC Breakfast's coverage of the Windows 7
release last week, but it basically consisted of 'Windows 7 is great and
shiny, Mac is also available, and by the way there's this thing called
Ubuntu which is coming out soon (!) and it's free but no-one wants to bother
with that'. I paraphrase, obviously, but you get the idea!

It turns out I wasn't the only Linux user that spotted this, and at
LUGRadioLive/Oggcamp at the weekend I found out that other Linux users had
written to, and had further dialogues with, the BBC about their somewhat
biased coverage. I came across this article (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8326264.stm) on the BBC this morning -
perhaps their attempt to placate some of the people they'd upset with their
Breakfast segment?

It's nice to see that Linux (Ubuntu particularly in this example) is being
recognised outside of 'the community' but on the other hand there is still
some way to go in getting Linux widely accepted as an alternative to
Windows. The events of the weekend were great, with 200+ linux geeks coming
together to demonstrate and celebrate the work that's going on within the
community, but I believe that Linux's best advocates are us - the users. We
have to get people talking about Linux, and demonstrate that it really is a
viable alternative. If I can convince my slightly technophobic dad of this,
surely between us we can convince hundreds, thousands of other people too?!

Now discuss ;)

Andrea