FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is defined on wikipedia.org as a "tactic of rhetoric used in sales, marketing and public relations....a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative (and vague) information". In layman's terms, it's a bunch of bull to scare people into doing what they want you to do. Linux and the Open Source community are no strangers to FUD.

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.

Less than a week after Google's VP8 liberation announcement, foes of freedom use sites that are foes of freedom to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about VP8

"... When the name is GNU, you should hear, «This system exists because of people who care about freedom. Join us, value your freedom, and together we can preserve it.» [...] Those companies that suppress the GNU name from their distributions are some of the worst offenders in not only distributing proprietary software, but also openly developing, promoting, and encouraging its proliferation.

We all know the term “FUD“, don’t we? If you haven’t heard of it, it means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, and it was created by a big software monopoly, often headlined “Get the facts”.

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.

Companies with inferior products are often tempted to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Paul Rubens wonder if Novell's FUD campaign a sign of a company that is afraid of the truth.

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.

"Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipdia talks about how Wikipedia aims to give people access to the sum of human knowledge. He describes how Wikipedia is very popular across the globe. Hundreds of thousands of articles in numbers of languages. He notes how Wikipedia is a charitable organization with only 12 employees. Yet, look at the affect they have on the world. Spent $1,000,000 in 2006 - supported by small donations from people around the world. (Also gets donations of caching servers around the world.) Wales goes on to define, what he means by free access to the sum of human knowledge. “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” The Wikipedia’s license allows you the: Freedom to copy, Freedom to modify, Freedom to redistribute, Freedom to redistribute modified versions ..."