I don't care why, let's just fix it
Spreading FUD about Linux can only come from one place, and no, it has nothing to do with nationalism or chauvinism. Follow the money, and you'll see that I don't have to even name the source of these lies; you all are big people, you can figure this out.
Linux is probably the savior of modern, traditional IT data centers. It scales, (unlike its primary competition) it can serve either as a single-user or massively multi-user, MP/MT system, it is probably as secure as its alternatives if not even more so than most, and it comes with applications that its competition sees no reason to supply for free (think sed, vi, emacs, Python, Perl, Ruby, git, Mercurial, svn, GCC ... the list goes on forever) -- or was that an opportunity to fleece the customer set?
Me, I think the FUD should be going the other way. What kind of future does WIndows have? Why, if Windows 8 is so great, do 75% of all major desktop-using organizations refuse to consider it? Why, if its supposed "innovation" is so notable, will Microsoft NOT release its code -- or at least fragments of it -- to its most technical user base?
The last 17 years of my experience with Linux, if not 100% perfect, have certainly been real, and I certainly have been challenged and encouraged to provide my own fixes, my own inputs, and my own education as to how this UNIX run-alike works. I can't say the same thing for my experiences with its competition (if we take *BSD off of that competitor list), which has been marked by frustration, proprietary barriers, "no way out" situations, the most DoSed OS on the planet, and oh yeah, let's not forget Patch Tuesdays (just to keep things interesting).
And I'm not getting off my soapbox without noting that higher education should be the very last people to spread FUD about an OS that's completely free, with no strings attached -- completely dissectable, fairly well-documented -- the perfect OS on which to learn how an OS is built and tested. It's true. I develop OS functionality & designs for a living (not Linux), and if I had to teach how the OS business works, I'd be dissecting Linux and teaching the lessons its developers have learned.
