I personally have no particular feelings either way about GCC; I don't write code any more, and when I did, I barely used compilers or xNix to do it. All I am

I personally have no particular feelings either way about GCC; I don't write code any more, and when I did, I barely used compilers or xNix to do it. All I am doing is responding to @catiopatio's comment: that apparently it was good _enough_ to inhibit competitors for a decade and a half. The economics of FOSS are not yet well understood (and FWIW, I think @catiopatio is totally wrong about the GPL). There were lots and lots of compilers in the proprietary space, and aggressive competition was the norm. The headhunting of Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft shifted the entire competitive market of programming languages for _decades_, but FOSS people don't tend to notice such things. (He developed Delphi. Without him, Borland floundered and died. With him, MS grafted a compiler onto VB, making a vastly successful product, and then abandoned it, and came up with .NET and C# instead, muddying the waters in ways that still shape the industry.)