> Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free?
Because RMS is an ideological obsessive for whom software being free was more important than making money. Although he wrote a major Lisp implementation himself (Emacs Lisp), he saw C as the more pragmatic path to making free software widely available than Lisp. Also, as a former employee, MIT gave him a lot of (in-kind) support.
(Actually GCC was not the first free compiler. RMS started out planning to turn LLNL's free compiler for a Pascal derivative, Pastel, into a C compiler. But he abandoned that approach, because the Pastel compiler was a big resource hog by the standards of the time – it was initially developed to run on a supercomputer, it wouldn't work on the Unix workstation RMS was using.)
CMU Common Lisp was free, and CMU's research funding paid for it. But their focus was on Unix workstations, they never saw the value in porting it to x86 (let alone DOS/Windows). By the time the x86 port happened (done by volunteers, not paid for by CMU), Java had already taken off.
Because RMS is an ideological obsessive for whom software being free was more important than making money. Although he wrote a major Lisp implementation himself (Emacs Lisp), he saw C as the more pragmatic path to making free software widely available than Lisp. Also, as a former employee, MIT gave him a lot of (in-kind) support.
(Actually GCC was not the first free compiler. RMS started out planning to turn LLNL's free compiler for a Pascal derivative, Pastel, into a C compiler. But he abandoned that approach, because the Pastel compiler was a big resource hog by the standards of the time – it was initially developed to run on a supercomputer, it wouldn't work on the Unix workstation RMS was using.)
CMU Common Lisp was free, and CMU's research funding paid for it. But their focus was on Unix workstations, they never saw the value in porting it to x86 (let alone DOS/Windows). By the time the x86 port happened (done by volunteers, not paid for by CMU), Java had already taken off.