``Spinning'' your opponent's strengths to make them appear as weaknesses.

This is the trickiest use of FUD because it's hard to identify what exactly is going on. For example: ``Also, there isn't one version of Linux there are many, and until everybody settles on the exact same version globally I wouldn't touch it with a long stick.'' (http://www.21store.co.uk/pdantic/). This is actually a combination of two different types of FUD:

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Market misdirection FUD, and

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``Spin'' of a strength.

The market misdirection part comes from the fact that the above FUD implies that Linux is operating in the proprietary market space rather than in the commodity components market space. In a proprietary market there is only one winner, the one whose proprietary product achieves virtual monopoly status. Linux, however, operates in a commodity market. All versions of Linux are based upon the same commodity components, with various value-added components used to achieve product differentiation. In short, Linux is more similar to the market for, say, motherboards, where there are multiple vendors all using the same basic chipsets and BIOS's.

The spin comes in where it is implied that being able to buy a Linux from multiple vendors is a weakness rather than a strength. This spin works because of the combination of market misdirection (people are not accustomed to thinking of operating systems as a commodity product) and past history with proprietary systems, where all proprietary systems are incompatible with each other and there is only one winner (implying that the person who chooses the wrong proprietary system will be the loser). Thus a strength (Linux is available from multiple vendors, and if you don't like your current vendor you can switch to a different one) is spun as being a weakness.