I don't know about that... Llvm didn't exist until 2003. The BSDs and Linux both existed for a long time before that, and Linux already had much more momentum at that point.

BSD was mired in the uncertainty of a lawsuit over some of their code at the time that Linux was getting started, and the FUD around that gave Linux a head start that BSD had up until that point, so you can't infer much about the reasons Linux's early success over BSD through that fog. If Linux had been dealing with the same problem that BSD had instead, BSD almost certainly would be in Linux's place right now.

Linux was dealing with SCO just a few years later. There was also a period where Microsoft was out to destroy Linux.

The difference is that Linux was well supported by the corporate world when the SCO/Microsoft lawsuit took place

I think that's less because of the license and more because people found patching gcc to be a big pain.

To be fair, GCC's design was motivated by the same thing as the license. They intentionally didn't modularize GCC so that it couldn't be used by non-free code.

> Anything that makes it easier to use GCC back ends without GCC front ends--or simply brings GCC a big step closer to a form that would make such usage easy--would endanger our leverage for causing new front ends to be free.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2000-01/msg00572.html

Correct, it’s not the license.