I was just reading the Groklaw commentary on Moglen and Florian.

What I find fascinating in this debate is the concept, or fear, that GPL software will somehow disappear.

Let me take an example from history, the MySQL vs Progress case where Moglen wrote the MySQL affidavit. Here is a link to the affidavit reference that Moglen supplied to the court.

A synopsis of this is that, Progress had released at the time a version of the MySQL Database which included their Gemini Storage Engine. They had not though provided the source code to the Gemini engine. This was a violation of the GPL. Progress lost their case and later made their engine available under the GPL. The engine is still …