To address your first point. If we can't even question the most basic of our tooling then we'll just inhabit a stasis that may be just a local optimum.
To address your second point. The way I think these licence/license words should go is - think of advice/advise. The verb's got the 's', the noun's got the 'c'. Am I wasting my time in actually caring about shit like that? Probably. But that's how I'm wired.
I don't think it's a waste of time, but language is fluid. Sometimes it changes very rapidly and sometimes slowly, but it's never static. Since the US uses a single spelling for both (and most of the world defaults to using US English) my guess is that the distinction will vanish eventually.
I'm slowly learning not to care about these distinctions when it comes to English, as long as the meaning is clear. The closer you look, the fuzzier language becomes - even in the UK or US alone, there are vast differences in the way it's used.