That's a bit of a misconception. Most Americans don't really speak English at all.

Exactly, RailCorp wants to be the ones lying to you about when the trains are coming. The BEST app in the category is the one that takes the supposed train times and adds half an hour to them to make them more realistic.

Another good commercial might be one featuring the animal mascots (possibly animated) of some of the many Linux distributions - i.e. an Intrepid Ibex, a Puppy for Puppy linux, a sneaky lookin guy in a red hat for Redhat, a lizard for SUSE, and of course a Penguin named Tux. I think that would be a bit of fun, and also pretty representative of what Linux is about :)

Also note that Marketing is NOT a product feature and has nothing to do with the quality of the software represented. I know this may come as a shock to someone like you whose only source of product information is marketing material.

There's more things that OSX/Windows have copied from Linux Distros then Linux has copied from OSX/Win. This is partially because updates and features make it into Linux upgrades which are released far more frequently then OSX/Win upgrades. ( eg, every 6 months for Ubuntu ).

They should get the teacher who said "there's no such thing as free software" to do an ad. ( http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/001236 )

Check your contracts, there may already be limitations written in regarding work you've done at the company. In a perfect world, if you're not using any IP or specific training/information provided/collected by your employer, you should be able to try and make it on your own and compete against them. Keep in mind knowing your market is one of the most important aspects of success, and market research may also constitute IP. Good luck indie coders!