C compilers weren't always free. When I started my career on the original Mac, there were multiple commercial Pascal and C compilers but nothing free for either

C compilers weren't always free. When I started my career on the original Mac, there were multiple commercial Pascal and C compilers but nothing free for either. For some years after that I worked on multiple UNIX machines and variants that each shipped with their own C compiler (often developed by one of several companies that specialized in this stuff) because gcc was no easier to port and produced lower-quality code. So it was free for users, but for the people who actually bought the systems it was bundled which is not the same.