There is nothing hypothetical about the freedom that Mozilla and GCC are trying to preserve. NeXT tried to release Objective-C as a proprietary patch to GCC. I

There is nothing hypothetical about the freedom that Mozilla and GCC are trying to preserve. NeXT tried to release Objective-C as a proprietary patch to GCC. It was only after the FSF told them that that was in violation of the GPL that they released the source under the GPL, now allowing Objective-C code to run on other platforms (I do in fact know people who deploy production code written in Objective-C on Linux, so this is not at all hypothetical). Furthermore, NeXT^H^H^H^H Apple is now an even larger threat to computing freedom. They now have several Tivoized devices which forbid you from installing your own software on them unless you agree to an insane license from Apple that prevents you from writing any sort of interpreter or compiler that runs on or even targets those devices (oh, and also forbids political satire, apparently, unless you happen to be a Pulitzer prizewinner and get lots of press out of your rejection). People are talking of using these devices to replace their primary computer; people are even using these things, which are controlled by Apple and can have content remotely wiped from them, for government business. This is most definitely not an issue of "hypothetical" freedom; there are real freedoms being taken by Apple. They have even explicitly stopped upgrading to newer versions of GCC because of fear about the GPLv3; they don't want to make their platforms more free as the GPLv3 would require. The H.264 issue is not hypothetical either. The licensing system is baroque and risky, as the MPEG-LA reserves the right to change the licensing in the future, meaning products with decoders, encoders, or even content encoded with H.264 may suddenly have massive royalties charged (with only a promise not to change anything for the next couple of years).