FUD REFLECTIONS

Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

Acronyms become buzzwords

so quickly in our blog-driven society that it sometimes takes time for the citizenry to catch up. When I first started hearing the term “FUD,” I kept waiting for someone to explain what it meant. I finally had to do a web search to get a definition. As you probably know by now, FUD means “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt,” and it refers to the tactics used by proprietary software vendors such as Microsoft to foment paranoia about Open Source. The term FUD is truly at the zenith of its popularity now. I see it almost every day. Even big companies like IBM and Novell use the word to rally their troops.