> More of the open source world does just fine without the GPL than you'd care to admit.

60% of projects on Freshmeat use the GNU GPL. If you include other copyleft licenses, such as the LGPL, this is nearer 70%. -- http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license

Copylefted software includes such important projects as:

The Linux kernel.

Languages such as: C, C++, Objective C, Ada (all through gcc); Java.

Database engines: MySQL.

GUIs and toolkits such as: Qt, KDE, GTK+, GNOME.

GCC is particularly important, because nearly all open source projects are compiled with it or written in languages whose implementation uses GCC.