And it shows how silly the idea is. gcc still sees plenty of forks from vendors who don't upstream, and llvm sees a lot more commercial participation. Unfortunately the Linux kernel equivalent doesn't exist.
It's also nakedly hypocritical behaviour on Stallman's part. Hoping (whether in vain or not) that GCC being Too Big to Fork ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 ) will keep people from having access to the AST interface really isn't substantially different from saying "why do you need source code, can't you just disassemble the binary hahaha".
I wouldn't call Linux's stance silly. A working OS requires drivers for the hardware it will run on and having all the drivers in the kernel is a big reason we are able to use Linux everywhere we can today. Just like if they had used a more permissive license, we wouldn't have the Linux we do today. Compare the hardware supported by Linux vs the BSDs to see why these things are important.
PlayStation and macOS kind of show what happens with upstream.
As did all the UNIXes that used to rule before companies started sponsoring Linux kernel development, and were quite happily taking BSD code into them, alongside UNIX System V original code.
Linux's position is more like "your out-of-tree code is not our problem". Linus didn't go out of his way to make out-of-tree modules more difficult to write.
