A quiet revolution is taking place on a young mailing list, one that overturns years of false enmity and makes perfect sense to most free software users. Having competed for the free desktop crown since 1997, collaborating on code but never on promotion, KDE and GNOME have launched an initiative to market and promote the free desktop together.

Interviews are a mainstay of the media. For journalists, they're an excellent way to check facts, get some nice quotes or structure an article. For free software projects looking for coverage, they're an easy way to write your own article and get it published. But getting the most out of an interview can be a fine art; journalists can misunderstand or even misrepresent what you say, and you can ruin or make your image in the eyes of the audience. The third article in this series suggests some strategies to adopt to make every interview a marketing success.

'It is a common assumption that companies who distribute free software will promote it, leaving the community to concentrate on the meat of the project itself (including code, documentation, graphics, and so on). But this is untrue; companies generally devote few resources and little expertise, leaving communities to fend for themselves in the big scary world of media and marketing.'