A reader has just sent us a gentle warning about what Microsoft appears to be doing at the moment to suppress adoption of Free software. This is separate from the most recent vapourware announcement [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Here is what he writes:

"FYI we're seeing another round of the 1990's support FUD being disseminated. e.g. [this new one]"

"In our risk assessment, we said we can go open source and the software is free, but how are we going to support it?"

"That is probably one FUD bit that will be used to market MSO2007, in conjunction with vague, unspecified promised, of ODF support without assurance of compliance or of an estimated delivery date.

“There's also a bit of amnesia about the long established role FOSS has had...”"Time to point out that there are loads of companies, locally, nationally and internationally to provide support for any many of FOSS application, system, network or a combination.

"Time also to point out that in general, FOSS is less complex to use and maintain. Now FOSS is more or less mainstream even on desktops. (Been there for a while on workstations.) You can go to many OEMs and get FOSS systems.

"There's also a bit of amnesia about the long established role FOSS has had in being the foundation of the The Internet, the WWW, and e-Commerce in general."