The unbundling of the free C compiler and the high price of the unbundled C compiler and AT&T's shitty bloated C++ compiler was emblematic of what was so bad about Sun abandoning their Berkeley BSD roots and getting into bed with AT&T System V with Solaris. And that provided an opportunity for Cygnus Solutions.

Not coincidentally, after he founded Cygnus Solutions (which Red Hat later bought), Michael Tiemann worked closely with Sun to support GCC on their platform.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160310075610/http://www.toad.c...

>We had the grandiose idea that major computer companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC would fire their compiler departments and use our free compilers and debuggers instead, paying us a million dollars a year for support and development. That wasn't quite right, but before we starved, we stumbled into the embedded systems market, doing jobs for Intel (the i960, a now-forgotten RISC chip), AMD (their now-forgotten but nice 29000 RISC), and various companies like 3Com and Adobe who had to port major pieces of code to these chips. In that market, once we fixed the tools to support cross-compiling, we had major advantages over the existing competitors, and we swarmed right through the market for 32-bit embedded system programming tools. And ultimately, we did get million-dollar contracts, such as one from Sony for building Playstation compilers and emulators. This allowed game developers to start working a year before the Playstation hardware was available. This enabled the Playstation to come to market sooner, with more and better games.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150701032848/http://www.toad.c...

>Michael Tiemann, President, has been writing free software since 1987.
He wrote the code for GNU C's function inlining. He wrote a portable
instruction scheduler which boosted GNU C's performance by 30\% on the
SPARC. He is the author of GNU C++, the first available native code
C++ compiler. Mr. Tiemann has ported the GNU compiler to the SPARC,
Motorola 88000, and National 32032 architectures, as well as adding
support for Sun's FPA board on Sun 3s. He ported the GNU debugger to
the SPARC and Intel 80386 architectures, extended the debugger and
linker to handle C++ features, and ported the linker to SPARC.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.ht...

>The real bombshell came in June of 1987, when Stallman released the GNU C Compiler (GCC) Version 1.0. I downloaded it immediately, and I used all the tricks I'd read about in the Emacs and GDB manuals to quickly learn its 110,000 lines of code. Stallman's compiler supported two platforms in its first release: the venerable VAX and the new Sun3 workstation. It handily generated better code on these platforms than the respective vendors' compilers could muster. In two weeks, I had ported GCC to a new microprocessor (the 32032 from National Semiconductor), and the resulting port was 20% faster than the proprietary compiler supplied by National. With another two weeks of hacking, I had raised the delta to 40%. (It was often said that the reason the National chip faded from existence was because it was supposed to be a 1 MIPS chip, to compete with Motorola's 68020, but when it was released, it only clocked .75 MIPS on application benchmarks. Note that 140% * 0.75 MIPS = 1.05 MIPS. How much did poor compiler technology cost National?) Compilers, Debuggers, and Editors are the Big 3 tools that programmers use on a day-to-day basis. GCC, GDB, and Emacs were so profoundly better than the proprietary alternatives, I could not help but think about how much money (not to mention economic benefit) there would be in replacing proprietary technology with technology that was not only better, but also getting better faster.