No windows in Amsterdam

I've posted this thing on Usenet a few years ago, and for some reason today I feel like posting it here too.

In the summer of 1999 I was in Amsterdam with Viu. One day she put on a t-shirt that said "No Windows, no problems", which she had bought at some Linux event, and we went out for a walk.

As we were crossing a street, a bus driver saw us (or rather the t-shirt) and became very agitated, gesticulating wildly, screaming "no windows, no problems, no windows, no problems!" and opening and closing the blinds on his own window. We figured that the driver read the anti-Windows message and saw the light, and continued our walk while speculating on what MS had done to that poor man.

Only when we reached the red light district and people started coming up to us and telling us that we were wrong and that the prostitutes sitting behind their windows have chosen to be prostitutes, and that their work conditions are not all that bad, etc., we figured out that the anti-windows text on the t-shirt was being widely misunderstood as an anti-prostitution message.

Every time when some unsuspecting soul came up to us to discuss the merits of the Dutch approach to prostitution, Viu treated him (and occasionally her) to a lecture about the evils of MS Windows and the virtues of Linux. The poor people did not know how to get away from her. Most of them did not even know what an operating system is, and she gladly enlightened them.

She would have probably managed to either convert all the red light district or scare away all the Windows-using customers, but I dragged her away with the promises of La Trappe Dubbel in a little bar on a side street.