To be fair, I highly prefer the situation it lead to, with now some competition between GCC and LLVM/Clang. But sure it was not rejected with that outcome in mi

To be fair, I highly prefer the situation it lead to, with now some competition between GCC and LLVM/Clang. But sure it was not rejected with that outcome in mind. However, some may not like the reasoning behind the unwillingness to move toward a more modular compiler at the time, but there certainly was a reasoning, and we will never know if the expected risks would have occurred in practice for GCC because later other ways were found to mitigate them. The LLVM world has moved to a non-copyleft one, with results that RMS maybe considers mixed: on one hand it attracts work (but being non-copyleft is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition, and for ex Linux attracts way more work by being copyleft), on the other hand RMS does not think that helping to create proprietary software based on free software is a good idea (of course the main purpose of a compiler is to compile software, even proprietary ones, but the philosophical issues come when you can make proprietary derivatives of the compiler or parts of it, not merely use it) In the end, for a supposedly stagnant project, GNU is not doing bad. It is still an essential part of mainstream Linux based systems. It is being actively developed. GCC is moving fast and also attracts lots of work nowadays. OpenOffice is stagnant. GNU? Not that much.