I dont know if licensing was the only reason why GCC missed out on this market. Using parts of the compiler as a library to aid tool building, refactoring and a

I dont know if licensing was the only reason why GCC missed out on this market. Using parts of the compiler as a library to aid tool building, refactoring and analysis is one of those great ideas that seems obvious in retrospect. To the credit of LLVM's early authors they had a larger vision of what a compiler ought to be than other compilers at the time. I dont recall gcc or any of the other commercial compilers having this expansionary vision of a compiler stack back in the 2000s. Once LLVM was able to move the goalposts on what users expect from a compiler stack, I can see that the license could have eased the decision for the likes of Google and Apple to come on board. It would be interesting if someone from Google / Apple / Microsoft commented on what the thought process was regarding moving to LLVM / Clang and if licensing played a role.