We have a free OS + kernel (and mind you, GNU/Linux is not the only viable free software OS) because RMS hacked relentlessly in the 80's on GCC and other C tool

We have a free OS + kernel (and mind you, GNU/Linux is not the only viable free software OS) because RMS hacked relentlessly in the 80's on GCC and other C toolchain components. In fact, so relentlessly it destroyed his hands with RSI. No amount of political pushing for copyleft would have made any difference if the code wasn't there. I'd rate GCC as by far the most important enabler of the abundance of free software we have today, and for that I'm deeply grateful to RMS. I'm fairly certain that no company chose GPL because the management's first concern was joining FSF's struggle against proprietary software. Businesses can't operate that way. Whether a company adopts GPL or not depends on perceived business benefits of adoption. So the question of this or that company adopting GPL or not doesn't have anything to do with moral reasoning behind GPL and is therefore irrelevant to what we're talking about. Yes, they're changing, in the same way that a factory may change when it adopts new machinery. Companies who adopt copyleft adopt it because of the "open source" philosophy, not because of the "free software" philosophy. This is actually one of Stallman's talking points (open source vs. free software) I'm very sympathetic to.