Defending GCC considered futile

It is not a universal truth whether or not proprietary or free software makes sense. In a world without copyright, the mechanisms of software profiteering and the utility of open or closed source radically change, since anything and everything is effectively permissively licensed.

On one side, it would take the profit motive out of proprietary software. Without copyright you can not prosecute users who redistribute your binaries, and thus it is "hard" to get people to buy them from you. I would not say impossible because I would not fathom considering all the possibilities in such a foreign context. But in the general case, without copyright, it becomes impossible to profiteer off false scarcity of information in the form of copies of software.

I say that because its important to contextualize why people strive to close off and lock down their software by depriving users of software freedoms - because copyright control, control of distribution, and the right to a monopoly over the idea means profit. If you take that away suddenly there is little incentive not to develop the software you want communally with others who want the same software, because your options are either do all the work yourself closed and have everyone else use it anyway, or open it up and have others contribute and lessen your burden. The mechanism though does not change - if you are distributing your software, which is the only way the GPL even takes effect to compel source release, in a copyright free world it makes more sense to at least release the source as an act of security. Because you cannot even sell visibility - ie, if someone wants to derive from you, you cannot extort them to see the source because if you do take money from them to see it once, you cannot legally compel them not to then release it once you have willfully given them a copy.

In that political paradigm - not a universe, not a fundamental rule of reality - software freedom just makes sense almost all the time. And the edge cases where it does not are much easier to overcome, because today free software is an uphill battle against corporate interests who use their power over software to extort their users of revenue to then fund the enhancement of their product. It is why photoshop and office are so hard to contend with, because they get so much money by using this framework of information monopolies to entrench themselves perpetually.

There are a lot of ways to frame a society that could in theory bias it towards free or proprietary software. which is in part why I don't always agree with RMS - I love the GPL and what it means in our political environment today, but I also claim it is a highly flawed economic model due to the existence of state sponsored IP in the first place. But there are many other ways to do things, and in any of those permutations free software may or may not be economically optimal, and that means it is absolutely simplifying things to claim "universes where free software make sense" exist. That is literally not seeing outside the box at all.

Windows has the mindshare of the masses. When many upper-middle class white Americans want to write a document, they can only fathom word. When they want to do a spreadsheet, they can only fathom Excel. When they want to draw, they can only fathom Photoshop.

It isn't about options or features or anything, I'm talking about the super majority of people who cannot any longer comprehend the existence of anything but what they know - where being presented with Linux destroys their world view. They talk about OSX like its an easy bake oven rather than another computer, or as if its another desktop UI for Windows that also runs Office.

Which is why Microsofts open source efforts are pretty much all on the developer end. They know their userbase is completely ignorant to everything just the way they intended, and it would take years of retraining to push the public conscience away from the mindset that Microsoft Windows is the personal computer, and everything else is some gadget.

Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ?

From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.

Only if you can convince people to use your architecture. The tools being closed is a minus in that, and must be taken into account with a lot of other stuff. A closed dev environment may well drown a brand-new ecosystem that you're trying to bootstrap.

Sony recently contributed back a ton of LLVM and clang stuff from their PS4 project, by the way. Why would they do that if keeping it closed was so rewarding?

And to write such compiler, you must as a minimum know what refactoring tools and IDEs are.

Also, I'm sure you always get naming and signatures right at the first try, foreseeing every possible evolution of the system. I don't, and since I don't like my programs to turn into huge piles of horror, I enjoy refactoring tools a lot.