Weigh the positives and negatives. List all the positive aspects of your current situation, and give each a percentage totalling 100% (i.e. "working with friends: 10%, creative control: 50%, looking forward to work every day: 40%"). Divide the buy-out money into those percentages ("working with friends: $100K..."). See if you're getting a fair prices for selling those assets. It's important to know yourself. If the joy you feel working every day is derived from your executive and creative control over your own work, you will likely be less happy when someone else is calling the shots. Cashing out is great if it gets you what you want, but what will you do then? If you are already making enough money to support yourself and you enjoy your work everyday then you may not want to cash out. Only you can decide.

If you do decide to sell, assume your buy-out goes as poorly as it possibly could. Your new bosses change everything, use fine-print clauses in your contract to screw you over, etc. What will you do? Things change when money comes into play. People change. Do not naively assume that the buyer cares for you in any way personally; this is business. Consult a lawyer and ensure that the buyout contract allows you an unobstructed and agreeable way out should things take a turn for the worse. Many buy-outs lead to the ousting of the leadership of the absorbed company at some point, and there's a reason. Make sure you have a backup plan (i.e. money, resources, contractual guarentees) if things go badly. "An ounce of prevention..."

I bike to work too; I bike to the train station, take the bike with me onboard, and ride it to work from my stop. Total trip is about an hour; which is longer than driving in (~35 mins), but on the train I can sleep, read or talk to other people. The ~10 miles I bike everyday means I stay in shape, don't need a gym and I feel and sleep better. I avoid sitting in traffic, paying for gas and wear-and-tear on my car. Most people would never consider riding a bike to work though; most of my co-workers think I'm nuts.

I have been doing exactly the latter for almost a year, I'm planning on totalling up my costs and writing about it shortly. The two costs that have surprised me the most were car maintenance and car rental -- when I owned a car there were times when I spent nearly a year's worth of monthly car rental fees on a single repair (~$1000).

The worst design decision yet, which is saying something.

Marriage was invented to allow poor people to have a chance at reproduction and a relationship; before marriage the elite would have enormous harems and the poor had little.

If your aim is to give it to the world, then do so, literally. The true value of software comes from the number of people using it; which means if you can design something useful and provide free high-quality tools implementing it that people can use and keep an active community behind the project so the project doesn't become obsolete then you will accomplish more than with money and a lawyer. Also I suggest a license that is as unencumbered and straight-forward as possible, such as MIT or BSD; as people will feel more comfortably including it in commercial software.

to the individual distros. a single distro is not a good idea for the reasons Torvalds gives; however it may be beneficial in particular instances to merge together distros with the same goals to reduce replication of work. actually merging two communities together is another story.