A discussion over at Cosmic Variance (‘Apple or PC laptop’) reminds me that a lot of people actually think that Apple runs on ‘Linux’. Nope, it doesn’t: it runs a ‘Unix’ flavour. If you want more points, 
you say either ‘Mach’ or ‘BSD’ (Mach is a kind of a hard to pronounce in English). As for which laptop: if I had the choice, I’d be going for a Toshiba again. My 2 year old one is still outrunning the one I got for work-related stuff (which happens to be an HP). And it’s a lot more ‘solid’ looking. Laptops need to be ‘solid’.
More confusion about Open Source: I hear a lot of people suggest to use open source software because ‘it’s free (as in beer)’. This is false. The point of open source software is that the ‘sources are open, so you’re free to look and tinker with it’ (free as in speech). Open source programmers are allowed to charge for their software. Heck, they’re even allowed to become millionaires (hey, it worked for ID Software).
Good. Now wonder why someone would ‘open-source’ software. A lot of people are surprised when I mention that the main reason for open-sourcing a project is to remain the copyright holder. Open-source protects the ‘copyright’ holder / owner of open-source projects: everybody is allowed to tinker with the software as long as they leave the copyright notices alone (generally this covers the BSD license). The GPL adds an extra clause to this: every derivative of a GPL-ed project must remain open-sourced. This aspect of the GPL is called ‘viral’: after all, if you use GPL-ed sources in your program, this automatically means that you must open your sources too. Afterall, this is only fair to the people who decided to open up their initial efforts. It should be no surprise that particularly BSD-licensed projects are popular with many commercial institutions because there are no restrictions to them.
So is GPL evil and BSD good? It depends on what your viewpoint is. If you’re a programmer working in ‘scripting environments’ a good bet might be to think of using the GPL license for your super-blogger-software. First of all there’s a lot of good (already) GPL-ed software out there. Since there’s no way to ‘compile’ your sources, you may just as well consider open-sourcing your project too. If you’re starting up a commercial business, you may may just wish to stay clear from any GPL available code.
I’ve heard people claim that the GPL is restrictive just because of it’s ‘viral nature’. Once again, it depends on what your viewpoint is. What is your definition of restrictive: release your sources as open source because you used GPL-ed sources or find out that you have absolutely no right to reinstall your popular software on your renovated home-built computer.