Re: "Super Banana" webserver (and the joy of Word 1.0)
A better analogy is if you then deployed your GPL software based "Super Banana" webserver to 10,000 servers in 20 seperate locations worldwide, offering a variety of commercial and free services, hosted on "Super Banana".
That is at the very least stretching the meaning, if not the word of the GPL.
As for the rise of Word and Excel, The original versions were crap compared to Wordperfect and Lotus 123. They gained market share by MS basically giving them away with large orders of DOS and later by MS continually fiddling with the Windows API's, thus causing the early Windows versions of Wordperfect and Lotus 123 to be almost unworkable.