That's a really easy opinion to hold until you try riding public transit four hours each day to and from your menial minimum-wage job. And I'm not making this up, I know someone with a college degree who is in this position.

The schools I attended from the late 80s through mid 90s had 5 to 10 Macs for every PC. In spite of this, there was usually a wait for Macs but never for PCs.

After we graduated, we found that the business world was 99% PCs, as it had been from day one, never having given Apple any serious consideration at all.

Most then went on to get the same kind of computer at home that they used at work because, as much of a pain as it is to use Windows, it's more of a pain to have to use both.

Then school boards started making noises, with some merit, that kids should learn in school what they'll be using in the real world. This caused many schools to switch to PCs.

This has nothing to do with technical merit and everything to do with first-mover advantage in the right market (personal computers for business).

Also, running virtual desktops over the network is not necessarily slow and clunky. Have you tried it? I've been doing it for years.

Suppose you choose to release the source code of your product.

The BSD license allows your competitors to take your work and add to it in secret ways to gain a competitive advantage over you.

The GPL guarantees that if they use the fruit of your labor, you also get theirs. Maintains a level playing field for anyone who wants to open their source.

The GPL is the license for anyone who wants to share without being handicapped. The BSD license is best for for parasites.

Bruce's article discusses license proliferation from the perspective of how-do-I; I'd like to confront those who use it to say why-should-I.

I used to work for a company whose lawyers argued that we must avoid Free Software because there were too many licenses to understand. Really.

Okay, so hundreds or thousands of Free Software products tend to use one of a few dozen licenses. We get that.

When you use proprietary software, every software product is governed by its own unique license. This is an improvement?

License proliferation is a totally bogus reason not to use Free Software.

Epilogue: My former employer has since seen the light. The legal team (whole executive team, actually) was sacked, and the company now uses and writes software under the GPL.

I have owned quite a few computers that could boot in about a second. One of them is even a PC-grade machine with a GUI and a hard drive. What they all have in common is the OS burned into fast ROM.

I agree with you that people of ordinary skills can choose to apply themselves and succeed in most endeavors. And if they enjoy doing it, they will probably be fulfilled. My point was simply that being good at something doesn't mean you will be happy doing it. As your post illustrates.

I wouldn't agree with your statement about aptitude, though. I hope you would agree that possessing adequacy is quite different from virtuosity. You can achieve mastery either way, but the former is more work.