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Suppose Stallman had put off the creation of GCC and gone with a BSD licensed compiler available at the time (assuming there was one). This isn't that far fetched BTW, he never sat down and wrote a windowing system, he went with X which is licensed almost identically to BSD. When GCC first become popular it was a shock that a free C compiler was available. People downloaded (or more commonly got Stallman to send them a tape) it and honestly didn't think it would work. When they found it wasn't all that bad they made modifications and sent them back to Stallman. To be honest there wasn't a lot of this going on until people started to realise how easy it was to port GCC. All of a sudden a company could make their own UNIX clone to go with their custom hardware. There was a real market for UNIX clones and if your hardware was good you could make a lot of money. So people would port GCC to their hardware and sell it. If GCC had really been BCC then there is no way those companies would have contributed their port back to Stallman. They would have simply compiled a binary and put it in their distribution. If someone asked for the source code they'd say "oh, it's just BCC with proprietory modifications" and no, you can't have the source code to those modifications. But because supplying source code (or distributing anything) was such an effort back then it made sense to make Stallman do all the distribution. So you just contribute your changes to GCC back to Stallman and if anyone wanted the source code with your changes you'd just point at him. When someone would send their tape to Stallman he'd pack it with not only GCC but GNU Emacs and all the other GNU source code. Which of course people would make their own changes to and possibily contribute back to Stallman. So filling this market need of a free C compiler really exposed a lot of people to the GNU project and it was possible because Stallman wrote GCC instead of using some BCC that may have been available.