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.

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. Then RMS was wrong. The SFLC says you're quite allowed to do that, a classic example being ffmpeg, which can be LGPL, GPL, or even non-redistributable depending on what external libraries you link it to on compile-time. People have to learn that RMS is not God and that just because he says something about the GPL doesn't mean that the lawyers agree.