> before Mozilla, and other such projects that came about in the 90s,
> were the GNU tools, such as 'gcc'.
There was a time when gcc was the center of the Free Software universe: compilers were otherwise a Big Business (hated by one and all, speaking of youthful urgency), and they all seemed to share the vice of being simultaneously big, slow, and buggy. gcc, like Michael Jordan in the early 90s, broke onto the scene and immediately dominated: it was free, it generated better code faster than any of the closed, for-pay compilers, and it really gave a lot of encouragement to the whole idea of What Was Possible.
But: it's a singular example, and was quickly overtaken by advances in compiler technology that made it into the for-pay compilers, and gcc has never really recovered. It is no longer anywhere close to the best compiler out there, and it is plagued by the very virtues that it espouses; as an example, because "anyone can" make changes to it, it has accumulated baggage of dubious value while growing ever more brittle, making a break from its past ever less likely.
There's an old saw:
Q: When was the Golden Age of Science Fiction? A: About 12.
For gcc, it was version 2.95 ... before that, it was exciting, in-flux, and a bit unstable; after, it became lethargic and set in it's old-fashioned ways. These days it's like a manequin that the youngsters hang this season's gaudiest fashions upon. The latest hot option switch which immediately renders code written just yesterday out of date and incompatible with next week's newest feature release. What's that you say? You're only using version 4.4.0!? But you're missing out on the new -fmumble-frotz feature that inverts the casual (but incorrect!) presumption of what is intended by (...) How can you go on living without upgrading to 4.4.1!?
And: it's perhaps the best example; so what does that say?
/jordan