[lmm]

The existence of LLVM means that GCC's GPL can't really guarantee anything anymore. 20 years ago we got an open-source objective-C compiler because its implementers wanted to reuse GCC's backend. But today a company in the same situation would just use the LLVM backend.

[pjmlp]

Except with LLVM they wouldn't need to return their work to GCC, like NeXT was forced to do with their frontend.

[lmm]

That's exactly my point. GCC's copyleft was only effective when there wasn't a viable permissive-licensed alternative.