Software projects can be hard work, sometimes spanning decades. It's perfectly reasonable that a project should want to remain open, and not want companies to

Software projects can be hard work, sometimes spanning decades. It's perfectly reasonable that a project should want to remain open, and not want companies to be able to make millions after contributing almost nothing to development. The difference between LLVM and GCC is also not purely ideological. By LLVM's own comparison page [1], while licensing is a difference, there are far more significant advantages to LLVM such as the fact that it is easier to integrate with things and build new tools for. And while it may be unfortunate if two similar, large projects emerge, is this really unique to open software? How many decades of pointless rework have occurred across dozens of projects due to the Microsoft Office file formats, for example? Something like that could have used a lot more GNU ideology in the beginning, frankly, and the world would have been a lot better off with a totally open document platform attached to a "viral" license. [1] http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html#gcc http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html#gcc