Emacs and the GPL

Many proprietary code bases have similar, technical violations. Over the course of my career, I've seen MIT-style code with the copyright headers removed, bits of "freeware" code under legally incompetent licenses that nobody should have ever touched, and even a GPL violation by a subcontractor who angrily insisted he knew more about the GPL than Eben Moglen.

We caught the GPL violation before distributing 100 copies, fixed it, reported ourselves to the FSF, and begged for mercy. They were entirely reasonable about the situation, and asked us to make the newly-fixed version of our software available to the people who had received the previous version. So in the real world, accidental GPL violations can usually be resolved easily, especially when they're as minor as the Emacs situation.