I believe that Microsoft has gained a strong hold in our minds based upon many myths and fears. These myths are fears will haunt us for ages until we openly accept and adopt the freedom of Open Source, even with some of its apparent shortcomings. Following are a few myths and facts which play a role in whether a home user shifts from Windows to GNU/Linux.

The undeclared war between the Microsoft and the European Union has been relatively quiet for the past few months; we haven't heard much from either party since the EU fined Microsoft $1.36 billion. The scarcely settled cauldron between the two organizations, however, is about to receive a good stirring, due to the actions of EU Parliment representative and Green Party member, Heide Rühle.

The Moscow regional administration will test usefulness of an Open Source desktop by migrating several hundreds of desktop PCs to Mandriva GNU/Linux and by installing OpenOffice on a thousand others.

There is always myths that surround the Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA Electronic Health Record. I have not found a compendium of these myths and the facts so I wrote this list. As well I was partially inspired by Fred Trotter's recent 'Antiquated or Proven?' response to a detractor of VistA. Please feel free to add to this list by replying below.

myths about OPLC's shown as "False" and "Falsehood" (inaccuracies) misunderstandings, and other responses where appropriate.

Recent articles, reports and documents show that there are still a lot of misperceptions regarding ODF in the market. Apparently, many people are still not well informed about ODF even though they choose to write about ODF. Therefore, I thought it can't hurt trying to dispel a couple of myths around ODF.

"Today I listened to Richard Stallman's lection which was recorded at Moscow State University..." -- Richard Stallman @ MIPT (Picture Reports) => http://ezheg.livejournal.com/30780.html ;)

We previously pointed out, backed by fairly extensive evidence, that Microsoft has a high level of influence and control over the government, especially the Department of Injustice [sic]. Intel is a similar story that is related to that of Microsoft.

The sheer ignorance regarding casual Linux users astounds me to no end. While I'm not interested in pointing fingers, there is a lot of misinformation about the Linux community, and we will help to dispel some of these myths, once and for all.