Actually the reasons against plugins and GCC being used as 'a library' went beyond mere politics, it was also a practical consideration as it affected the relev

Actually the reasons against plugins and GCC being used as 'a library' went beyond mere politics, it was also a practical consideration as it affected the relevance/existance of GCC. Back then the there was an obvious threat of GCC becoming little more than a backend/frontend solution for proprietary interests which could lead to the open source part eventually wither and die. Steve Jobs when at NeXT illustrates this problem as he tried to combine NeXT's proprietary ObjC frontend with GCC's backend and sell it under the reasoning that the 'end user would do the linking', he couldn't legally do so which is how GCC ended up with ObjC support which it otherwise hadn't, atleast not then. Nowadays open source is established and it's benefits are well proven so these choices may look overly paranoid when viewed in the open source landscape of today, but back then and for a long time in GCC's development they certainly weren't. The fact that an open source free compiler toolchain like GCC has established itself as such a 'de facto' solution has obviously had an incredible impact on the acceptance of open source in general, not to mention that Linux, the open source BSD's, and tons of other open source projects (and likely lots of proprietary projects aswell) would never have gotten anywhere near where they are today had it not been for the existance of GCC, a top-notch compiler toolchain free of charge and free to distribute.