Ladies and gentlemen, sit down. You have all been taken advantage of in the worst manipulative mental carnival imagineable.

FUD. We all know the term. Wikipedia states it as: "Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is a tactic of rhetoric used in sales, marketing, public relations, and illiberal democracies.

Established IT vendors have long relied on "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" to scare their customers away from the upstarts. But customers are getting tired of it, and a new generation of vendors is finding that FUD only makes them stronger.

After they ignore it and dismiss it, it is time for the age old sales technique of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt - FUD. These are the typical top 5 FUD SCARE myths trotted out by enterprise software salesmen.

Recently, on another site, someone suggested that the development and marketing of Ubuntu was done by paid staff of Canonical. Having been actively involved in the Arizona Team for 8 months I would like to say that I really doubt that the suggestion can be taken seriously by anyone who knows a little about Ubuntu.

"Wikipedia is without a doubt, one of World Wide Web’s wonders. I myself used Wikipedia to search information on many things, from education to entertainment. There are many cool things that you can learn from the vast amount of information inside Wikipedia. Thus in this post, I have listed down 20 little known ways and tools to use Wikipedia..."

Companies with inferior products are often tempted to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A bit of FUD is an effective leveler, allowing these companies to compete on more equal terms with the competition.

Public sector and Open Source Software (PS-OSS), a report commissioned by the EU Commission addresses the question : What would be the potential impact on the development of the Information Society if public organisations (administrations, research institutions, universities, agencies, public companies) were to release software fully owned by them under a Open Source licence?

Does the troll-blocking organization that recently secured a set of supposedly Linux-related patents from Microsoft need sizing for a penguin-shaped tinfoil hat? Or was the IP sale really Redmond's secret scheme to "create fear, uncertainty, and doubt" in the open-source community?

In an effort to thwart Linux sales on netbooks, Microsoft has started a training program at Best Buy to “educate” their “experts” on Linux. And true to their fashion, MS resorted to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and straight out LIES!