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I think that's less because of the license and more because people found patching gcc to be a big pain.

To be fair, GCC's design was motivated by the same thing as the license. They intentionally didn't modularize GCC so that it couldn't be used by non-free code.

> Anything that makes it easier to use GCC back ends without GCC front ends--or simply brings GCC a big step closer to a form that would make such usage easy--would endanger our leverage for causing new front ends to be free.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2000-01/msg00572.html

Correct, it’s not the license.

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