i agree that we should have a better model as a society to produce things like compilers, but having a direct retail relationship with a closed source provider

i agree that we should have a better model as a society to produce things like compilers, but having a direct retail relationship with a closed source provider was pretty nasty. because of tooling, large code bases, and weak standardization they had a huge amount of lockin. and only a single narrow funnel in which to address deficiencies. and while certainly on a lower tier than EDA seats, werent super cheap. they usually had limited platform support. while they did optimize better for their targets, otherwise they were poorer systems than gcc, with all its warts.