Stallman and other GNU folks have claimed that they stuck with dynamic linking to foster cooperation between hackers. They knew that it wasn't a win performance

Stallman and other GNU folks have claimed that they stuck with dynamic linking to foster cooperation between hackers. They knew that it wasn't a win performance-wise but they wanted to encourage hackers to help each other. The idea was that if someone found a bug in a library he or she depended on they would be "forced" to send the patch upstream rather than just fixing the bug in their local copy of the library. Thus they made dynamic linking the default in gcc and kept static linking as something of an after though. I read it on a mailing list a long time ago so I don't have a source.