A while back he was blocking things like, a package manager for emacs (that does exist now) and making GCC able to export an AST for external tools to manipulat

A while back he was blocking things like, a package manager for emacs (that does exist now) and making GCC able to export an AST for external tools to manipulate (in particular for emacs to do semantic editing of code). In both cases since it would make it easier for closed source software to make use of GPL software.