2. If I switch to GNU/Linux, I can't use Microsoft Office anymore. Not true. Codeweavers makes a product called Crossover Office, which is designed to allow MS Office and other important Windows software to work on GNU/Linux. Its compatibility list include hundreds of other programs from companies like Adobe, Intuit, Macromedia and many others, and its capabilities expand with each new release. As of this writing, CrossOver Office costs US $40.

Additionally there are other office suites designed specifically for GNU/Linux. OpenOffice.org is an excellent suite with an advanced word processor, spreadsheet, database frontend, vector drawing program, and presentation program. It doesn't include a personal information manager or email client like MS Outlook, but that functionality can be achieved through the Outlook-like Novell Evolution. You also won't be able to directly translate any Visual Basic macros from Excel or Word over to OpenOffice. Sun Microsystems uses OpenOffice.org to create their StarOffice suite, which comes with some extra fonts; better conversion utilities (including a macro converter); a better spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus; and commercial support from Sun. Both StarOffice and OpenOffice.org can convert nearly any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file without problem.

3. Does Windows really have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than GNU/Linux? There are some indisputable facts about both operating systems that can help you decide this matter for yourself. To begin with, GNU/Linux is usually either free of charge or cheaper than Windows XP for desktop, workstation, and server use. Some commercial distributions -- most notably Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- can be more expensive than Windows Server editions under certain circumstances. Microsoft requires that Windows Server customers pay per-connection licensing, which means that every computer or independent network device (a print server, for instance) must have a license to connect to Windows Server. So if you have 100 desktop machines connecting to your server, you will need 100 client access licenses (CALs). GNU/Linux distributions do not have such requirements, so an unlimited number of machines can connect to a GNU/Linux server. So the more client machines you have, the more cost-effective GNU/Linux is. If you're only running a small office with 5 client machines, Windows Server could be cheaper in terms of up-front licensing and support costs.

Where Windows can beat GNU/Linux is in staffing costs. An experienced Unix or GNU/Linux administrator can cost a company substantially more money than a Microsoft Certified Support Engineer (MCSE). On the other hand, most Unix or GNU/Linux sysadmins have far more experience and know-how than the average MCSE. Essentially you're getting what you're paying for. Again, smaller operations may find that Windows is cheaper on paper because of administration costs.

All of the up-front costs don't mean a thing when it comes to long-term maintenance costs. That's where the Linux kernel and the GNU utilities and tools beat Windows: they have gone through more extensive security auditing and they have a far larger development team than Windows has. The Windows security model allows for a wider range of post-installation failures due to viruses, trojan horses, and spyware. It's harder to write and propagate viruses for GNU/Linux than it is for Windows, and it is not susceptible to the thousands of Windows-based viruses on the Internet. In other words, GNU/Linux has a better security model and greater reliability. One of Microsoft's claims about GNU/Linux (and sometimes the Firefox Web browser) is that, from a certain frame of reference, some GNU/Linux distributions have more security advisories than Windows. However, if you closely inspect the nature of the advisories, you will find that the majority of the most dangerous security advisories are issued for Windows, not GNU/Linux. The information you want to consider is not the number of advisories, exploits, patches, or flaws; what you need to know is the severity of the security problems and the time it takes the vendor to patch them. Also keep in mind that GNU/Linux exists in software distributions, which include the entire software stack from the operating system to the server or desktop software. This entire stack is maintained by the software vendor through an integrated update framework that the sysadmin can set to push patches to all machines automatically. Windows Update only handles updates for the operating system and the IIS Web server; it does not handle updates for any other software on the machine, which will remain unpatched until the sysadmin does it manually.

Where GNU/Linux can fall behind is in software support. While you can use some versions of MS Office as mentioned above, it won't support some other types of Windows programs. If your business depends on proprietary Windows-based software that was written specifically for your company (or for a specific niche market), the vendor probably does not offer a GNU/Linux edition and may outright refuse to port it to other operating systems.

If your employees are used to using Windows, it may take some training to get them accustomed to GNU/Linux -- and that can introduce additional costs in some instances. TCO is not something that one can make definitive statements about; what works for one company may not work for another. In most cases GNU/Linux will be substantially cheaper than Windows, especially in the long run (due to Microsoft's licensing policies). Many businesses these days are running GNU/Linux servers and Windows clients; in this situation they can keep the client OS that their staff are accustomed to while retaining the safety and security of a GNU/Linux server environment.

4. Open-source programs have hundreds of different versions because there are so many people working on the project. An open-source or Free Software project has a central repository for the source code which only a very select few (or one person) have access to. That person or team of people are the maintainers or committers of the project and they decide which changes go into the source code. Below them are hundreds or thousands of contributors who examine the code and write patches or suggest changes. Their changes are not made until accepted by the people in charge. So while there may be thousands of people working on a project, its direction is controlled by a governing authority. In some situations, contributors will start a new project based on the original because they feel that their changes should be included despite the reluctance of the project authority to commit them. They take a copy of the source code, rename the project and become their own separate entity. This is known as a "fork," and its implications can be either good or bad depending on the situation. There have been many successful forks that end up being better than their parent project, and there have been countless forks that end up getting no developer support and fall by the wayside. In the end, only the useful projects will survive.

The gist of it is, if a program splinters into derivative projects, those derivatives are not part of the original project. So if 50 people decide to fork the Firefox browser, there will not be 51 versions of Firefox; there will be one version of Firefox and 50 other browsers that are not Firefox, but will be based on the same code.

5. Open-source programs are less secure because hackers can see the code. "Hacker," in the proper sense, refers generally to a programmer or software developer, usually one who is very good at what he does. These are generally good people who do good things; ill-intentioned hackers are known as "black hat hackers" or "crackers."

The issue of security in open-source programs is very important to the developers working on it. Most of the popular and oft-used open-source projects subject themselves to regular security audits where several experienced programmers review the source code to ensure that there are no security holes. If any are discovered by this audit or by a bug report or other method, patches appear almost instantly to fix the problem. Since users don't have to rely on a single vendor for patches, the work is done much faster and more efficiently. Opening the source code to universal peer review makes programs more secure, not less. More eyes seeing the code means more flaws are caught before they become a problem.

6. You get what you pay for, so free software must be bad. Do you always get what you pay for? I'll sell you a writable CD disc for US $50,000. If you buy it, would you get your money's worth? Some might say that the disc, of no intrinsic monetary value, was overpriced -- and they'd be correct. But what if I gave you the disc for free? Would it then be worth less than when I was charging $50,000 for it? Would it be less useful? The point is, value is not determined by price. What a vendor charges and what use you derive from a product are not always congruent. If all of the free, community GNU/Linux distributions were over $100 each, they would be no more or less valuable than they are now -- they'd just cost more. If you truly feel that you must pay a lot of money for good software, the Free Software Foundation gladly accepts donations.

7. Free software is Communism. Free software promotes a gift economy and is anti-capitalist. Free software will kill the software industry and hurt the economy. First let's examine free software. Basically it is software that you are allowed to use, sell, distribute and modify in any way you see fit. Compare that with proprietary software, which most often only allows you to use the software on a limited basis -- no redistribution, sale, or modification of the software is allowed. Actually it goes further than that; criminal and civil penalties can be imposed on you for doing any of those things. It would be more accurate to say that proprietary software is fascist rather than suggest that free software is communist.

The "free" in free software does not mean "free of charge;" it means "free of restriction." That's free as in rights, not price. This is a point often misunderstood or misrepresented by proprietary software CEOs and others who have a proprietary software agenda to push.

That being said, free software is often also free of charge. Some say that this is bad, because it will harm sales of expensive proprietary software. The uninformed will often equate this with communism because it appears to be anti-capitalist. It is not anti-capitalist in the least -- by all means, free software and open-source developers would love to charge money for their work. Many already do, or at very least solicit donations. The true "payment" in free software is not to large proprietary corporations like Microsoft; the payment instead goes to individual programmers or projects. This happens when a company wants to add a feature or in some way modify a free software project for their own use. To do so they must hire programmers to make the modifications, and that can be exponentially cheaper than developing a new program in-house or paying a proprietary vendor for a pre-made program. Bugs and security problems are also fixed much more quickly using this model. But best of all, a company has control over their own software rather than depending on a software corporation for support, bug fixes and security patches. So it's true that free software might harm the proprietary software industry, but there is no evidence to suggest that it will hurt the economy, since programmers will still be employed to work on software.

A "gift economy" is one in which status is given by how much one gives to their community (as opposed to an "exchange economy" where status is given to those who have the most stuff). There are already many microcosms which subscribe to this social system, the scientific community being the most famous. Scientists receive status from their peers by contributing the greatest ideas and inventions. Would it be a bad thing for the software industry -- which is just as intellectual a pursuit as science -- to change to this social system? There is no reason to believe that anything bad would happen as a result. Just like scientists fuel all of the most important medical and manufacturing industries, software developers fuel the service and support industries.

Capitalism was founded on the premise that economic gain would encourage people to be more productive; the key here is encouraging people to be more productive, not the means by which it is achieved. Free software projects do give status to those whose contributions are most useful, and this encourages better software development. It does not mean that the entire US economy should -- or could -- switch to this philosophy.

Lastly, let's take a look at what communism really means. It's a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership and applies a "sameness" to everyone involved in the system, eliminating social classes and personal distinction. It removes uniqueness and originality from the individual, under the guise of supporting the larger community. It has proven to be totally ineffective on all scales but the smallest; the best propaganda against communism is the fact that it has yet to elicit an effective government and a satisfied populace.

Free software does not promote the abolition of private ownership; rather it recognizes that software is a tool that we all can and must use, so therefore we all should be able to use it according to our needs. Free software says that software should not belong to one of us, thereby preventing a social hierarchy where the owners have control over the users. Free Software allows contributors to be recognized for their contributions. Free Software gives us the freedom to make a program unique to our situation, and to sell it or give it away to others if we so choose; Free Software doesn't give us all ownership of the software but it does allow us the same freedoms that owners have without allowing us to lord it over others. With Free Software, we all have the same right to our software tools that everyone else does. Proprietary software, on the other hand, uses brute force to remove that freedom and individuality from us -- it allows the owners to "own" us.

What free software does not do is dispute the authority of copyright. Anyone who puts their software under a free software license will always retain the copyright to their work. Many free software developers do, however, choose to assign their copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation so that it can be more easily protected, legally.

8. No one ever got fired for recommending Microsoft. This implies that someone, somewhere, has been fired for recommending something that is not "Microsoft." I would like to see evidence to that effect. I'd also like to see proof that no one has been fired for recommending a Microsoft solution. I can think of several instances in which someone could be fired for recommending Microsoft. For example: recommending Windows 95 for a public Web server.

9. GNU/Linux is hard to use; Windows is easy to use. This depends on your ability to analyze and solve problems. Commercial GNU/Linux distributions like SuSE, Xandros and Linspire rarely have significant problems. When they do, you have commercial support options available to you. Windows has attempted for years to do everything automatically for the user; while in many cases this works properly, when it doesn't, it's pure hell to try to work around the problem. Commercial GNU/Linux distributions are more or less in the same category, except that you don't have to go chasing down hardware drivers from Windows Update or from the manufacturer's Web site. If the hardware is supported, the driver will load upon detection of the new equipment. In effect this makes commercial GNU/Linux distros easier to use because you don't have to mess with drivers. Non-commercial distros often require you to configure things yourself. When you work on config files, they are well-commented and include a manual page that tells you the details you need to know. If you need help, there are a plethora of excellent message forums and mailing lists which more than likely already contain the answer to your problem. If not, experts are generally quite willing to help you solve your problem as long as you've already looked through the documentation.

In terms of usability, the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) are just as easy or easier to use than the Windows XP interface. KDE is in fact a great deal like the Windows environment in terms of how programs are executed and how they are listed in the menus, and GNOME is much like Apple OS X. Other window managers and desktop environments exist which can be customized to your needs if you require something more unique. GNU/Linux can become what you want it to be, with experience and patience. Where Windows users often find that their only solution to a problem is to erase Windows and reinstall it from scratch, GNU/Linux users almost never have to resort to this method to fix a problem. When it's working the way you want it to work, a GNU/Linux-based machine will tend to stay that way until a hardware failure.

Summary
GNU/Linux is a lot of things, and by the same token it isn't a lot of things. The best way you can determine its worth to you is by researching which distribution will be best for what you want to do, and to give it an honest and patient evaluation. Fear generates myth, and in the case of GNU/Linux there is a lot of fear from several fronts: from proprietary software manufacturers, from Windows-dependent businesses and consulting firms, and from users who don't understand what free software is about. Don't be afraid -- try it for yourself.