The big lie.

Probably the most commonly cited objection against the use of free software is the one of lack of support. The lie goes pretty much like this: With commercial software, we have a company standing behind their product. They have a financial stake in seeing that their customers needs are met. I can call them on the phone and get answers. With free software, I have something written by a hobbyist in their spare time and I'm on my own.

Amazingly, these things are asserted by people who should know better. Many of them have struggled with buggy software from major hardware and software companies. Phone calls yield hopeful promises that it will be fixed in the "next release" (which sometimes does, and sometimes does not happen).

The other story.

My experience with free software has been entirely different. Quality is quite high and it is universally distributed with source code. This means that if I have time and motivation, I can attempt to fix a problem. It also means that there is a large base of people who know the source and a fair chance that if you are not working on it, someone else is. It is common to get an authoritative answer to a question in a few hours or overnight via the Internet. In many companies of even fair size, there is usually only a handful of people who are working with the source code, and a fair chance that not many of them spend much time fixing bugs.