The point is, these things would have happened no matter what. RMS simply overplayed its leverage, and the magic that kept GCC at the centre of everything for d

The point is, these things would have happened no matter what. RMS simply overplayed its leverage, and the magic that kept GCC at the centre of everything for decades broke. If he could just stop being a zealot for a split second and actually tried to understand the situation, he could have maybe been able to foresee that Apple had the people, resources and will to reimplement a whole compiler infrastructure that could threaten GCC's dominance, but he neglected it (it famously didn't care about Apple's offer to merge LLVM into GCC under the GPL). Sometimes even the best of intents are shadowed by people's inability to compromise.