In particular, the guy who wanted to be able to make it a compile-time option had a program that would do basically nothing without readline That's not true. I

In particular, the guy who wanted to be able to make it a compile-time option had a program that would do basically nothing without readline That's not true. If you read the story you'll see that the guy had a working program for years before he used readline. The use of readline only improved an already working program. Not to mention, the program in question was a language implementation and readline had nothing to do with it. It was a user interface perk. At one point he said he'd distribute a working program without readline or readline support even enabled by default and leave it up to the user to configure it. It was only going to have an interface to readline without including any readline code. He was told he couldn't even do that. In the end he chose to GPL the entire language implementation. To him, it probably didn't make a difference what the license was and it was easier than replacing readline. Personally, I would have replaced it with a BSD-licensed alternative just out of spite given the way the whole thing was approached. The line about how a judge wouldn't be convinced the program didn't violate the GPL read like a thinly veiled threat to me.