I wouldn&#x27;t describe the FSF&#x27;s position that way (they value Free Software for its own sake, and their goal is that all software should be Free Software), but even if that <i>were</i> their position, I&#x27;m arguing that their handling of GCC and refusal to support it as a library directly motivated the creation of LLVM and led to a scenario that better supports the creation of proprietary software.<p>Providing a GCC library would have significantly lessened the motivation for LLVM: many of the &quot;we need a library&quot; folks would have one, leaving just the &quot;we need a permissively-licensed library&quot; folks, and the &quot;GCC&#x27;s codebase is awful&quot; folks.  (And even some of the latter group might have worked to fix GCC.)<p>That&#x27;s not the <i>only</i> thing done wrong with GCC development.  The much worse problem is that GCC doesn&#x27;t really support reviewing and accepting patches; you pretty much have to have commit access to do any significant work on GCC.