haruspex: That's not really true; Office only costs about four times as much as Keynote, which I think is pretty fair since Office includes four pieces of software of comparable complexity (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage). But your point is generally valid. The license is just an additional data point to use when comparing software.

Also, to bring this more on topic, it is clear to me that license management itself is so resource consuming that the promise of getting rid of it altogether is perhaps as great a selling point for free software as the zero cost for licenses. But this approach also places an emphasis on the level in which a particular free software license is "hassle-free", and I think that the various BSD licenses will fare better than the GPL in the long run because of this.