I'm not saying, though, that he's unaware of the real world impacts. I'm saying that he doesn't care about them (in this case). He is a smart man, and a visionary, and believe it or not, I have a great deal of respect for him, in large part because of how prophetic he's been regarding some of the troubling developments of recent years. That said, he doesn't appear to care about the impact of this decision, which is to drive everyone to clang/llvm.

If no one forks gcc to keep it from becoming technically inferior, then in ten years, we'll just have another open source compiler monoculture, but this time it will be clang/llvm.

(Edit: forgot an important word.)