This strikes me as a particularly 20th century way of looking at open systems. I can certainly understand the impulse that might inspire WotC to feel like they were being cheated out of something by a company that simply reprinted their core system, but the fact of the matter is that Mongoose sold, at best, 10,000 copies of that book. Vs. the "Real" Player's Handbook, which probably moved something like 350,000 units. Sure, that easily seen as cutting into WotC's pie, but it's really not that significant a chunk of their expected profits for the book, and surely most of Mongoose's audience owned the real Player's Handbook anyway.
In fact, for a customer to have such an exotic D&D fetish as to A) know about and B) purchase the Pocket Player's Handbook the chances are very high that the buyer owns not just the Player's Handbook, but probably the entire core rules and a brace of expensive hardcover support volumes direct from Wizards of the Coast.
The Pocket Player's Handbook amounts to a vanity press effort before the mighty juggernaut of WotC's publishing operation, especially on the scale of the core rulebooks.
Several years later, the entire text of the SRD is available for free online in a searchable format. How silly it seems in this environment to scapegoat the Pocket Player's Handbook as some sort of affront to the concept of the OGL or threat to Dungeons & Dragons.
The OGL is about preserving the system and opening the "lingua franca" of 30 years of gaming history to independent development. It can survive existing for free on the internet, and it can survive a cheap and dirty reprint of the SRD.
