evolution is more concerned about the species as a whole.

There are many evolutionary biologists who would disagree with this statement, probably most of them. Read on wikipedia about group selection for more information.

Of the apps you listed, only Tomboy is an official Gnome app. The others are just third-party apps written using the gnome libs and Mono. Furthermore, there are (in my opinion) better gtk or gnome apps in each category that that don't use Mono. I don't see how this makes Mono "firmly entrenched" in Gnome.

For the record, I am a long time user of gnome, but am deeply skeptical about Mono, and avoid it like the plague. This attitude seems to be fairly common in the gnome community in my experience.

Also, to keep this message on topic, I don't use QT or even have it installed on my systems, but I think this license change is a smart idea, and I hope it increases QT usage in areas where it makes sense.

Oddly enough, Qt and KDE are the "free" ones now, where as Gnome is now firmly entrenched with Mono.

Do you have any evidence of this? To the best of my knowledge, the Gnome community is deeply ambivalent about Mono. There are very few official Gnome apps that use it.

"if you avoid using programs from another desktop"

Which is just not possible. Where is the CD burning program in GNOME that beats K3B? Where is the music player that beats Amarok? In the other direction, where is the office suite that beats OpenOffice.org? You cannot avoid mixing GTK and Qt apps on a desktop without hurting yourself.

Personally, I don't really like K3B. I use Gnome Baker and am perfectly happy with it. Amarok seems decent enough, but I prefer Quod Libet, a player that uses gtk, gstreamer, and python.

I don't mean any disrespect to the hackers who have put a lot of hard work into KDE/QT apps, but I don't even have QT installed on my system any more and don't feel like I'm missing anything. Likewise, I'm sure someone so inclined could do without gnome and gtk. It may be hard, though, to find an adequate substitute for OpenOffice, if one needs that sort of app.

Having a stock option is not the same thing as having actual stock. An option is just the right to buy stock at a predetermined price at some point in the future. As a rule, you only exercise that option when you actually want to sell the stock and take your money, since there is little to no upside to exercising the option and then holding on to the stock. Furthermore, all options that haven't been exercised already are likely worthless, since the stock price has come down so much, and will probably never be exercised.

However, Microsoft stopped giving out stock options in 2003, and started giving direct stock grants. I'm not sure, but I suspect that these are non-voting shares. Microsoft's executives and board could not care less about the wishes of non-voting stockholders. I suppose these stockholders could organize a class-action lawsuit against the board, claiming they are not living up to their fiduciary duties. If things get bad enough where this is likely to happen, though, Microsoft will have much bigger problems to worry about.