From WIRED NEWS

She's the closest thing to a supermodel you'll see in connection with Linux's biggest trade show. Nobody knows her name, but with immaculately coiffed blond hair, striking black glasses and a perky grin, she's an idealized image of the geek girl next door.

The female model appears in glossy ads, direct-mail brochures and the website promoting LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the biannual gathering of the Linux faithful taking place this week in New York City.

Oh, and there's this: She's also been featured on Microsoft's website since last year.

Microsoft said the mystery model -- neither LinuxWorld nor Microsoft knows her identity -- has been featured in the section for Visual Studio .Net since February 2002. That means she had been plugging .Net for six months before LinuxWorld's advertising agency, Accent Communications, tapped her to be one of the faces of the expo last fall.

A spokeswoman for LinuxWorld said the mystery woman was one of several images chosen from the Getty online image bank to "represent the diversity and the spirit of the Linux community."

But if she also represents Microsoft's .Net development tools, does that make her a Linux user or a Windows user?

Linux creator Linus Torvalds suspects the latter. "Those shifty eyes -- notice how she's clearly avoiding looking at the camera -- seem to certainly imply a MS-chick," he wrote in an e-mail interview.

Marketing consultant Lisa Sullivan -- a former VP of marketing for Red Hat -- believes the model bears little resemblance to either a typical Linux geek or .Net developer. But, Sullivan says, from a marketing perspective, the mystery woman clearly possesses a kind of crossover geek chic that makes her appealing to both camps.

"It's almost like she's perfect. She's attractive, but she doesn't seem unattainable," said Sullivan. "She's good looking, but not so good looking that people think that she's a joke."

This lets both LinuxWorld and Microsoft mold her to their own purposes. So as far as LinuxWorld is concerned, Sullivan said, "they're trying to say, 'Hey, there will be women there, potentially.'" Microsoft's message? "They're trying to show that people who use their technology look nice."

Ironically, intellectual property rights played an important role in the modeling mix-up, says Rosanne Marks, vice president of corporate communications for Getty Images, which licensed the images to LinuxWorld and Microsoft. According to Marks, both parties chose the image because it is royalty-free.

Microsoft has expressed concerns about royalty-free licensing of W3C standards -- something Linux developers strongly support.

Marks says that by licensing a royalty-free image, both LinuxWorld and Microsoft were able to use the shot of the mystery woman as often as they liked without paying more. If Microsoft had opted for Getty's more expensive "rights-managed" licensing option, no one else could have used the image. "That's part of the nature of royalty-free. With rights-managed imagery you can also purchase exclusivity," she said.

The model's platform independence is a "bad thing from a marketing standpoint," said marketing exec Sullivan, because, as a result, neither company can "differentiate itself appropriately."

For her part, Sullivan has a theory about the mystery woman's true geek roots.

"I think she's a Mac user," she said.