Partisanship leads people to argue over code words instead of the issues that spawned them.

Point out one "on the other hand" about Iraq when talking to someone committed to either a Republican or Democratic position and you risk being accused not only of ignorance, but of willful misinterpretation of the facts based on your own presumed support of the opposite position.

Think it doesn't happen in IT? Remind a Mac user that the damn things do, too, crash, sometimes so hard you not only have to shut them down, but unplug them and remove the batteries to get them unstuck.

Remind a Linuxian that the amount of time it takes to build and maintain an ethically and ecologically pure open-source server can make it less cost effective than just buy a Windows or Mac machine and run commercial software.

Or, suggest that someone's favorite virtual-server-management feature isn't critical, or even advisable, based on policy and service-level issues rather than anything having even remotely to do with technology.

Some of your responses will be based on clear-eyed analysis; others will be based on knee-jerk partisanship.

The problem is that the vendors—who spend a lot of money—have legions of smart, erudite, aggressive spokesweasels fogging up the blogosphere and reinforcing the worst impulses of the knee-jerkers.

As time goes on and the rhetoric gets thicker, it will be a harder and harder slog for IT managers who would rather build and operate their own tech universes than spend all their time fact-checking FUD and counter-FUD from both vendors and other users.

It might do some good for the vendors, and make more work for the analysts, but I doubt it will help the end users very much, no matter how partisan or non-partisan they are.

The problem will be sifting the useful and broadly accurate content from the blowing smoke and FUD, no matter how fact-filled or even how well-intentioned either of them appear to be.