I agree that freedom is important. That's why I like LLVM: it gives me practical freedom to do research on analysis and transformation of actual code. Before, y

I agree that freedom is important. That's why I like LLVM: it gives me practical freedom to do research on analysis and transformation of actual code. Before, you were legally free to do this, which was a good starting point to be sure, but in practice your options were fork GCC or write and maintain a modern C++ compiler from scratch, either of which would be a high-end project by itself and neither of which would be feasible as a secondary project alongside whatever you were actually trying to do. As for the locking down of devices, I agree this is a problem but I don't believe the causes and potential solutions have anything to do with GCC versus LLVM.