One of the latest bits of Linux FUD to spew from Microsoft concerns patent infringement. Microsoft has made the claim that open source violates 235 of Microsoft's patents. To keep this claim viable though, Microsoft has been tight lipped as to what those actual patents are. A court in Germany ruled that companies could not make patent infringement claims without actually revealing what those patents are (a law I suggest they pass in the United States), and as a result, Microsoft hasn't uttered a word about patent infringement in the country, despite its heavy use of open source and Linux software in the government. So, does this FUD have any foundation? It might. It's entirely possible that there are patent infringements within open source software; Microsoft has taken out so many patents on so many mundane aspects of its operating system that it would frankly be difficult not to infringe on some of them. But by not revealing what these patent infringements are, they prevent the open source community from coming up with ways of not violating them (if they even exist), and they can keep doubt in people's minds for as long as they want. How many corporations are already uneasy about the idea of switching to Linux? They've bought into so much other FUD over the years, and now they have to contend with Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, touting that Linux users are also responsible to Microsoft because of these "patent infringements".

In 2003, SCO had made similar claims that IBM had given away its intellectual property, its trade secrets, to the Linux community. They claimed that there were parts of the Linux kernel that read line-by-line exactly the same as their code. SCO argued that unless more companies started licensing their property that they would be forced to start making patent infringement law suits against Linux developers, specifically targeting Linus Torvalds, the Linux originator. This FUD temporarily worked in SCO's favor, boosting their stocks considerably, before everyone realized the claims were completely falsehoods. After which, the stocks crashed, and SCO fell into obscurity, when a court ruled that Novell owned the copyrights all along.

There's also TCO, Total Cost of Ownership. Many proprietary software companies have made the argument that in the long term, Linux actually costs more than their software. They manipulate statistics, and they use any method they can to try and prove this point. Microsoft has tried to make this claim, and recently, with the latest release of the Windows Server, they're once again standing by this claim. According to Microsoft, it costs more to train people in Microsoft, because of another class FUD, that Linux supposedly has a higher learning curve. They've consistently argued that Linux is not easy to use, that it's only for "geeks". This has been the most prevalent and longest lasting form of Linux FUD. Whenever I talk about Linux to non-Linux users, they always state this claim, despite the fact that they have never used a Linux system, have never even looked at a Linux system, have no idea what Linux really is; but, they are absolutely positive that Linux is not easy to use. If you have used any of the popular Linux distros in this turn of the century, then you'll have trouble believing this lie. Linux has become so easy to use that Wal-Mart managed to sell tens of thousands of Everex PCs to your average Wal-Mart customer, who, according to a study conducted by Wal-Mart, preferred a larger sized case for the PC (even though the PC could have run in a small case), because they are often-times a less savvy computer user and associate size with quality.

My favorite, classic FUD comes from Steve Ballmer. "There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it." Here, Ballmer went to the route of the American psyche. How many Americans, to this day, still cringe a little in fear at the voicing of "communism"? If there's anyway to turn Americans off from buying a Linux PC, it's to emblazon the image of a big, red, Soviet Flag on the face of Linux, to conjure up an image of FIdel Castro reciting his communist propaganda from a speech he'd written on his openoffice,org word processor, to strike fear into our hearts at the thought of a Wisconsin Senator named Joe McCarthy barging into our houses in the middle of the night to send us away to prison for life because we owned an Ubuntu PC. I can't say if this FUD actually worked; it was so preposterous, and so few people give any credence to what Ballmer says anymore, that people might have just laughed at it. But it does show the depths to which proprietary software makers will go to keep the Linux and open source software threat out of their wallets.

Please contribute some FUD you have encountered over the years. Also, check out one of our previous articles on a classic Linux FUD, whether or not Linux is ready

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