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I personally have gotten under the hood to tinker with open source software so it can and does happen. Of course most of those "myths" seem more like "straw men" to me. Are more choices always better? No. But I'd rather have too many choices than no choice. Should all software be free? Of course not.

I'm no fan of the viral nature of the GNU license, though I think it's their right to license things that way if they want. I much prefer the BSD-style licenses and there are certainly major open source projects that use that model rather than the GNU model. BTW, Linux breaks the "viral" nature of GNU in a very critical way, much to Richard Stallman's chagrin from what I've read. If it didn't, people would be talking about FreeBSD rather than Linux. "Open source" is not only the GNU license. In fact, Richard Stallman doesn't really like the term "open source".

BTW, Linux breaks the "viral" nature of GNU in a very critical way, much to Richard Stallman's chagrin from what I've read.

Linux is licensed under the GPL, so how can it break the GPL's terms? Or are you talking about how Stallman got his panties all in a bunch when Linus decided to use the proprietary Bitkeeper as Linux's content management system? Those two just do not get along. Stallman is an egotistic ivory-tower type, while Linus is a down-to-earth realist.

I'm no fan of the viral nature of the GNU license

That would be the GPL license not the GNU license, and though many people throw the term viral around it is nothing of the sort..