The tool chain was developed in academia for 6 years before they adopted [1]. With an incredibly pervasive BSD-esque license [2]. Thus, companies can use the c

The tool chain was developed in academia for 6 years before they adopted [1]. With an incredibly pervasive BSD-esque license [2]. Thus, companies can use the code without giving themselves back. This is why Sony uses BSD based OS on the playstation [3]. Its cheap, they can modify it, and keep what changes they deem necessary. And yes, I'm aware Apple has given back to the project. But it seems pretty obvious why they don't use the GCC when you consider how hard Apple has tried to purge the GPL from its OS [4]. And the legal battle NeXT had with the FSF/GNU [5]. I stand by, we won't see Apple open source it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois/NCSA_Open_Source_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois/NCSA_Ope... [3] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MzA http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU1MzA [4] http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_through_NeXT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_thro...