once upon a time, it was either really hard , really expensive, or both, to get your hands on a c compiler for whatever platform you were on. nowadays, thanks to rms and all of the folks who have worked on gcc over the years, the very idea of charging for a compiler seems crazy. now, gcc is dead easy to install on almost every platform, and we take its availability for granted.

(as an aside, have you ever tried to download xcode for a version of osx which is not the current one? i have had to do this several times, and it is an absolute nightmare.)

i see that clang has a license that would allow apple's version to have proprietary bits. do they? under what license does apple distribute their binary?