Operating system advocacy

Operating system advocacy is an attempt to increase the awareness and improve the perception of a given computer operating system. The motivation behind this is often to increase the number of users of that system, the assumption being that more users will lead, directly or indirectly, to greater improvement in the operating system ("OS"). The term is most commonly used to refer to OS's that are in the minority of usage, to compare to the OS that the majority already use. A further assumption often made by OS advocates is that most of the users of the majority OS only use it because they are familiar with it or they are locked in. Advocacy of the majority OS is most often in reaction to the sometimes over-zealous advocacy of the minority OS's.

Usenet

There are several Usenet newsgroups devoted to operating system advocacy:

Related Topics:
Usenet - Newsgroup

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• — advocacy relating to Linux
• — advocacy relating to Microsoft Windows
• — advocacy relating to Windows NT
• — advocacy relating to OS/2
• — advocacy relating to BeOS
• — advocacy relating to eComStation
• — advocacy relating to BSD
• — advocacy relating to FreeBSD
• — advocacy relating to NetBSD
• — advocacy relating to OpenBSD

For several of these newsgroups, the separate .advocacy newsgroup was created in order to keep operating system advocacy postings out of all of the other newsgroups in the hierarchy for the relevant operating system. The Guide to the Windows newsgroups2, for example, exhorts Usenet posters to not "get involved in arguments about Windows vs. OS/2 vs. Macintosh vs. NeXTSTEP except in the comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy group" and to not post (and to not follow-up any other posts on) any operating system comparisons or arguments about operating systems in any other newsgroups.

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Operating system advocacy discussions on Usenet, and elsewhere, have spawned a number of specialized jargon terms to characterize various behaviours commonly seen in such discussions, such as "MicroDroid"3 and "Amiga Persecution Complex"4.

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The perceived negative characterizations associated with operating system advocates have led various people to create guidelines for what they consider to be positive advocacy, such as the Linux Advocacy Guidelines5 and the Guidelines for Effective OS/2 Advocacy6.

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