Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.

It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

Other people have other goals, and sometimes the BSD style licenses are better for those goals. I personally tend to prefer the GPL, but that really doesn't mean that the GPL is any way inherently superior - it depends on what you want the license to do.

If it is relevant there is always somebody else out there.

I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.

I can't say that I like MicroSoft: I think they make rather bad operating systems - Windows NT is just more of the same - but while I dislike their operating systems and abhor their tactics in the marketplace I at the same time don't really care all that much about them.