> It wasn't just a compiler, it was a whole ecosystem that had to be built or improved. About half of our employees were software engineers, so by the time our

> It wasn't just a compiler, it was a whole ecosystem that had to be built or improved. About half of our employees were software engineers, so by the time our revenues grew from <$1M/year to $25M a year, we were spending about $12M every year improving the free software ecosystem. And because we avoided venture capital for six years, and shared the stock ownership widely among the employees, when we got lucky after 10 years and were acquired by the second free software company to go public (the first was VA Linux, the second Red Hat), all those hackers became millionaires. A case of doing well by doing good. Indeed. The sheer amount of economic impact GCC has had - it has to be enormous. Back in the day for example we were able to ship our s/w on Solaris SPARC and bunch of other platforms (HPPA/AIX(Forgot what arch) without licensing any compilers because GCC 2.95 existed! (As I recall compiler licenses were sold separately from the OS and weren't cheap especially for a non-US company.)