I agree that a smaller (and free) tool chain would be great, but so far as I know there is nothing preventing anyone from making one.
Related, I realize it is now the case, but when did casual users start needing gcc? Time was, in my pre-OSX days, compiling things yourself if you weren't a dev was seen as somewhat pointless, you just get thousands of users all building the same binary instead of building one binary to be downloaded by thousands of users...
I agree that a smaller (and free) tool chain would be great, but so far as I know there is nothing preventing anyone from making one.
Related, I realize it is now the case, but when did casual users start needing gcc? Time was, in my pre-OSX days, compiling things yourself if you weren't a dev was seen as somewhat pointless, you just get thousands of users all building the same binary instead of building one binary to be downloaded by thousands of users...