Two GCC stories

You do realise that you devalue your own words as soon as you start describing the carefully reasoned arguments in the FSF's many articles as 'extremist political rhetoric', right?

(Your point about the FSF's FTP site stands, but not that well: there were many other high-bandwidth sites around even in the 80s with very large repositories of code on them. Much of that code was dramatically less free than the GPL or BSD licenses: oddly, nobody remembers most of that stuff anymore, while the GPL-licensed code soldiers on.)