GCC was originally written by Stallman, and greatly improved through the late 80s and early 90s, in part IIRC by a number of hardware vendors who thought it was

GCC was originally written by Stallman, and greatly improved through the late 80s and early 90s, in part IIRC by a number of hardware vendors who thought it was a better way to get a high quality compiler than paying Whitesmiths, MetaWare etc. BSD could have become fully free with the portable C compiler (pcc) but in the early 90s it only supported the VAX and Tahoe (CCI Power 6/32) architectures, and I don't think would have been a good foundation for a modern compiler. Various folks had hacked versions of pcc in the 80s to support other architectures, but the code didn't go back upstream. Without GCC, there's a good chance that the entire FOSS ecosystem wouldn't exist.