That was the reason why GCC adoption took off in first place.
During the UNIX freebie days no one cared about Stalmman's freedoms.
After Sun being the first UNIX vendor to split UNIX into multiple SKUs, for developers and users, then GCC suddenly became relevant after all.
For languages like Ada, this was even worse, because SunOS/Solaris SDK only contained traditional UNIX compilers. For something like Sun Ada compiler, it was extra.
FVWM ran circles around MWM or CDE itself about speed. Rxvt was much lighter than an xterm, not everyone needed to plot Tek graphs. Even some late Irix users preferred JWM against the propietary options.
Nowadays, GNU's the slight bloated one, being Guix the 'essential' GNU distro, making lots of 32 bit machines without SSD's a crawling nightmare to install.
I worked in a small shop in the late nineties where we used gcc during development within the MS Windows environment because MS' own compiler (Visual C++, iirc) produced either (depending on settings) no warnings or buried the relevant ones under those of questionable code in the system header files. We had to use MS's compiler for the final product, as gcc couldn't produce shared libraries in that environment at that time, otherwise we would have gladly used only gcc.
Anyone that tries to use UNIX stuff on non-UNIX OSes ends up having to deal with interoperability pains, hence why cygwin and mingw keep being leaky abstractions, regardless how much better GCC might generate raw code versus VC++.
Additionally, nowadays clang also ships alongside VC++, and is offically supported by Microsoft as well.
> From 1996-1999, the stable choice on both speed and reliability was the GNU one.
Meh, gcc 2.8 was buggy as hell on Linux/i386 by around 1998, as was gcc 2.95 up to 2.95.3. The issues with it are what led to the egcs fork which eventually replaced the original gcc branch. So it wasn't all sunshine and roses.
I thought it was missing features in the C++ compiler and its less-than-perfectly-clear error messages which led to the split. The C compiler was pretty sound early on. Sure, occasionally there were bugs, but users, including Linus Torvalds, complained loudly about those, because expectations were already high.
EGCS was started because of Stallman. They refused to criticize him directly but it was clear from their Declaration of Independence email that it was Stallman. They even used its language but avoided Stallman’s name to make the eventual merge politically possible.
> During the UNIX freebie days no one cared about Stalmman's freedoms.
On the contrary, they cared plenty, because GNU freedoms let them have a usable, reasonable-quality (and sometimes high-quality) environment both as developers and as users, which they could otherwise not get unless they were rich or employed by a corporation (who would then have them do what it wanted, not what they might have wanted to spend their time on).
GCC usage IIRC exploded when Sun made their compiler suite extra paid option instead of bundled as part of standard SunOS install.
Before that, GCC was of interest particularly on platforms that didn't provide good CC - a lot more platforms with various quality of software - by comparison the big name workstation vendors that survived longer also had higher quality compilers.
When compiler suite was included by standard, GCC had much less of a benefit to many users (I think gdb actually might have driven more?)
No they didn't, that is why before Stalmman, most UNIX stuff was either free because AT&T wasn't allowed to charge for UNIX as commercial product, or MIT/BSD license.
Which is how UNIX workstation market came to be, and how even Windows ended up with BSD code on the networking stack.
The rise of non-copyleft licenses proves that the only freedom most people care about is their wallet's.
Most GPL software won't survive its authors, even Linux kernel remains to be seen when Linus et al are gone, and it gets taken over by newer generations VC driven.
non-copyleft free-software licenses like the bsd license or the 'mit license' provide plenty of freedom in stallman's sense; you can study, copy, modify, and redistribute what they cover. when you're talking about people who only get wallet freedom, you're talking about free-tier proprietary licenses, shareware, free-for-noncommercial-use licenses, illegally copied software, that kind of thing. and while certainly there are lots of people using tinkercad or pirated windows, obviously those ecosystems don't have the vitality of blender, netbsd, and linux
Apparently most people care more about being able to make a living out of selling software, as supermarkets are quite bad at taking Github stars, while others rather not pay for the work of others.
There is no reason those barons can't make money on top of AGPLv3 software too, its easy to comply with if they thought anyone would bother to enforce the license.
Also, if you have a desirable app that they want to make money off, they have the ability to just reimplement it from scratch, or make a protocol-compatible equivalent, so the license does not matter in the slightest to them.
During the UNIX freebie days no one cared about Stalmman's freedoms.
After Sun being the first UNIX vendor to split UNIX into multiple SKUs, for developers and users, then GCC suddenly became relevant after all.
For languages like Ada, this was even worse, because SunOS/Solaris SDK only contained traditional UNIX compilers. For something like Sun Ada compiler, it was extra.