Some comments about how GCC could have avoided this made me think that this is a setback for free software, but why isn&#x27;t this just a rising tide benefiting both free and proprietary software?<p>The NCSA license explicitly allows sublicensing, so both the GNU project and Microsoft can create derivatives under free and proprietary licenses respectively, for example.<p>[I am not a lawyer, but this is the reasoning of the accepted answer to a stackexchange question applied to the NCSA license: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmers.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;105912&#x2F;can-you-change-code-distributed-under-the-mit-license-and-re-distribute-it-unde" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmers.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;105912&#x2F;can-yo...</a>]