Most nerds are shitty PR / marketing people. We suck at explaining things in simple ways, and we get bored trying to explain things like 500 times, which annoys people who don’t find things as simple as we do.
That being said, Linux has been moving down the chain of nerdom. It started with the hacker / programmer / developer types. The ones who don’t mind making source-code fixes and re-compiling their entire operating system overnight. Then it started moving down the chain a little to early-adopter, hobby-programmer / web developer types. And, now down past the upper echelon of hardware geeks / tech heads / and non-programmer geeks into the realm of the moderately computer intelligent, businesses like Google and IBM, and the person just looking for an alternative to windows Vista.
This has been largely due to massive improvements in the various flavors of Linux out there.
But, it still lacks good PR. Linux still suffers from the image of the uber-elite hackers pounding away at a keyboard, despite having worked well past that now.
But for a while I’ve been discussing with people real ways to promote Linux into the average computer user / learning children environment in order to attack the mind-lock windows has on this generation.
This article seems to sum up a lot of my thoughts on getting something a little more serious going in that direction.
http://opensourcelearning.info/blog/?p=338
And, I like some of these thoughts. And I really like the name “Linux Proliferation Agreement”