I think it also got wind because it was just so much easier to compile stuff with gcc than it was to use the vendor compilers, with all of their incompatible fl

I think it also got wind because it was just so much easier to compile stuff with gcc than it was to use the vendor compilers, with all of their incompatible flags and extensions. This was in the days before package managers, when everybody compiled open source stuff themselves, a lot of things didn't use autoconf, etc. I remember compiling almost all open source stuff (emacs, tex, postscript, file utils, etc) with GCC, and reserving the vendor compiler for situations where performance actually matters (math / linear algebra packages, professors' code). EDIT: I remember a few years where people tended to assume all the world ran SunOS 4.1, just like people assume all the world runs some flavor of debian/ubuntu now.