alt Hacker NewsTo 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.