As if we didn’t have enough Linux distros floating around, now there’s one tailored to 4-11 year-old girls, allegedly the most user-friendly distribution ever made.
BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.
From what I hear of Barbie’s new technopolitics, I like her a lot more than I used to:
… If Barbie were a career-focused woman working in the IT industry in 2003, she would support open standards,” he says. “She would be seeking out free and open-source alternatives to current proprietary solutions, saving her company tens of thousands of dollars on management headaches associated with tracking software licenses and preparing for BSA audits.
Interesting that Mattel hasn’t yet shut this site down; the company was once extremely vigorous about threatening ISPs with customers hosting Barbie trademark violations. I did follow a Google link to another BarbieOS site that apparently had been shut down.
For years, Birdhouse has hosted Mark Napier’s Distorted Barbie, with built-in mirror (so that if necessary, I could cease and desist and the meme would live on). I have yet to receive anything from Mattel regarding the site, so they may have pulled back on their campaign a bit. Perhaps they realized they would never get the cat back in the bag, or that they were actually damaging their corporate image more than improving it, or that the line between satire and slander can be too blurry to define consistently, or…