The Incendiary

Back when I did marketing consulting, I filtered client canditates by asking them to agree with my marketing logic:

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Conversation is fire.
  3. Marketing is arson

I've never met a better arsonist than Donald B. Marti, who ran Electric Lichen until it was absorbed by VA Linux Systems, where he still works. Although he is is not part of VA's marketing team, he is an A-1 hacker of culture, which is the highest calling of what Christopher Locke (AKA RageBoy) calls gonzo marketing. Gonzo marketers are born arsonists.

So we discover that Don is the guy who unearthed the silly Unisys Patent on the .GIF compression algorithm (LZW), made a lovely stink about it, and then staged "Burn all GIFs Day," along with a Web site (www.burnallgifs.org) to coordinate and then commemorate the event.

Don was also a prime mover behind "Windows Refund Day" And he's the skilled hacker behind one of the Web's great memes: the operating system sucks-rules-o'meter (www.srom.zgp.org/)

More than a great incendiary, Don is a revolutionary thinker. Here are just two lines he dropped in a recent conversation:

"Now it's time to hack the real world and let other people write Web sites about it."

"The Sucks-Rules-O-Meter is the first crude attempt to do the opposite of advertising — in which the customers do the writing and the supplier does the reading."

Here at Linux Journal we are adopting the sucks-rules system to keep tabs on what people really say about the various Linux distributions (see page X). Hey, it's too good a hack not to use.

— Doc Searls