Comment by cyphar

GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom. The toolchain would not exist if Stallman hadn't made the decision that user freedom was something he should work towards. And we wouldn't have any free software without GNU, because that's what the world was heading towards in the 70s and 80s. BSD would still be proprietary, since Stallman talked to Berkeley to convince the developers to release their improvements to Unix.