My personal opinion, which might not line up with anyone elses: GCC is a 'part' of GNU/Linux because of the goals/aims of GNU/Linux, which is to have a freely m

My personal opinion, which might not line up with anyone elses: GCC is a 'part' of GNU/Linux because of the goals/aims of GNU/Linux, which is to have a freely modifiable and distributable operating system. If you put yourself in the time when this project was started, there was no free compiler, they simply didn't have one. But in order to meet the goals of the project, they would need one (you might not need one to run it, but you sure do need one to develop it), so it's therefore a very core part of the project. You don't need a c-based tool chain installed to run a GNU/Linux system or make it usable for a non-dev though, no, Ubuntu doesn't have it by default for example.