alt Hacker NewsGCC was one subject of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The development process was changed to more closely mimic Linux and the original GCC steering committee was dissolved. Cygnus had a big role in GCC becoming an industry fixture for its hayday. Eventually the lack of big revenue meant that the license became an annoyance that industry could deal with by nurturing Clang and LLVM with acceptable quantities of money. In FSF orthodoxy, they were supposed to lose that fight.
Not necessarily. In (my understanding of) FSF orthodoxy the existence of a viable GPL alternative forces the hand of competitors in certain respects. LLVM could never drift towards a more proprietary model and expect to succeed at it so long as GCC remains viable.
"Best" doesn't matter, you just need a seed crystal that's good enough.