"When there's trouble on the home front, wage war," goes the old saying. And so Sun Microsystems has launched a highly targeted ad campaign promoting OpenOffice.org on buses in Redmond. OpenOffice is, of course, the would-be open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The ads' slogans seem targeted at persuading users to drop Microsoft for OpenOffice: "Stop giving a bully your lunch money", "Compatible with expensive, closed, memory loving software", and "Prehistoric reptilians welcome." But the ads only appear on the sides of commuter buses that run from Seattle to Microsoft's suburban Redmond campus. Writes The New Marketing blog, which broke the story, "Maybe this is crazy talk, but I get the idea that these ads are aimed primarily at Microsoft employees. They're like propaganda leaflets dropped over enemy territory. Sun isn't trying to win customers, it's trying to demoralize the enemy!"

But the enemy is hardly demoralized. It didn't take long for a loyal Microsoftie to suggest some new ad slogans for Sun, which has wavered in its support for the open-source Linux operating system: "Solaris, er, Linux, no Solaris, no Linux, uh Solaris, no, aw never mind."

Digg readers, naturally, enjoyed the mudslinging, but were worried by Sun's tactics: "What is Sun's gain? Is Sun simply desparate?" wondered one. Maybe so, but perhaps Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz feels it's better to be desperate with a sense of humor.