Debian should get some money and promote itself
Some well placed ads explaining the benefits of Debian in the general press could do all of us some good.
These could be paid for by hardare vendors paying for certification.
For example, IBM and HP are big advocates of Linux therefore we buy their servers. However, we're never perfectly sure if Debian will install on all machines. Sure, Debian goes straight on to the low end servers but what about the ones over $10,000?
So if Debian will install straight away HP/IBM could put an official copyrighted sticker on it saying 'Debian Certified'. The Debian organisation could charge for these stickers.
Now for those ads.
Most company bosses don't know anything about software. They have a Microsoft based laptop and think that MS is the only software company around.
Some well placed ads in the Financial Times, New York Times, etc explaining the benefits of Debian could make them realise that they're paying megabucks for a poor quality product. The downtime and general failure of Microsoft products is terrible for their bottom lines.
Let's face it - when I tell clients that we've got servers which haven't evern been rebooted for years they are surprised and impressed. Imagine how the stats would look. Google runs on Linux - Debian is one of the best Linuxes! List all the top CGI based films - all rendered on Linux etc etc etc
It's actually been slightly easier recently. The two most recent projects have specified that NO Microsoft software should be used. One of those was because the company's new Vista laptops had been a disaster - and the upgrade to Office 2007 had broken their in house Access based CRM application.
The second one was because the company did not want to be tied into a proprietry product.