Need Ideas For Company Newsletter About Linux

[Maheriano]

Every month there is a company newsletter passed around the office and this time it's my turn to write an informative article for it. Since I'm pretty much the only open source advocate in the office, I thought I'd write it about Linux. The company is primarily an oil and gas software development shop and only a portion of the company is actual IT, the rest is management, sales, data storage, all kinds. So I need some ideas on topics to put in the newsletter, it can only be 300-400 words.

I think going too in depth would hurt the heads for those non IT and basing it too much on Ubuntu itself would be missing the focus on Linux as a whole. Maybe a brief history on Linus, the origin of Linux and then say what it's used for today?

[vikramaditya]

I would definitely play up the "free" angle, right from the start. Also, mention its security benefits, variety of distros, and those preinstalled apps that would most appeal to your readers. Remember not to be too preachy, though. A horse is more likely to drink if he thinks nobody's watching.

[Maheriano]

This is what I ended up putting together. It's going to be in the April newsletter.


Linux
When people think of computers, most think of Windows or a Mac. However there is a third option when choosing an operating system for your computer which is a little less known and that is Linux. Linux has gained notoriety in the recent years as the next up and coming power player in computing technology for many of the advantages that it carries over Windows, especially the recent netbook market which contain smaller hardware which Windows would never be able to run on.
Developed through the 1980s and 1990s, the bare basics of Linux was developed by a man named Linus Torvalds and eventually morphed into the many different versions available today. It’s developed under what is known as the GNU General Public License (GPL) which requires that its source code be open and free to anyone who wants to modify it. This enables anyone and everyone who wants to modify it to get in there and change whatever they want. Ultimately Linus oversees the final changes that get put into the updated versions but this has resulted in a worldwide network of developers updating your application by the hour and all completely free of charge. Nobody pays to use the software because nobody gets paid to develop it, that’s the premise of the Linux GPL.
Since it is free to develop and update, many people have different ideas of the direction Linux should go in, and if they don’t like how it works, they can make all the changes they want and redistribute their customized version to anyone who will use it. This has resulted in a number of different versions referred to as distributions, named Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat, Slackware, Gentoo and an endless list of lesser known distributions.
The reason people don’t hear of Linux or see commercials for it is because it is free and not owned by anyone, so nobody is willing to pay to market it since there is no return on their investment. Linux currently accounts for about 1% of currently used operating systems in the marketplace but there is no true way to measure its presence in the market. But it is free so maybe you’ll like it if you give it a try!

[Sporkman]

I did a similar short writeup on my website:

http://sporkforge.com/notes/sporknote.php?n=2