> What I also came to think of is that GCC recently positioned itself in opposition to the FSF because of the "Stallman-Controversy". Is this a kind of retaliation on their part?

"Random acts of rms" aren't a new problem for the GCC developers, and resulted in the egcs split, have caused ongoing pain with people trying to improve the ability of GCC to integrate with IDEs, and of course there's the whole debacle where the Clang developers offered their work to the FSF but Stallman missed the email and found it a decade later...

However, several of the lead developers for C++ (at least) announced they were no longer going to be assigning their code ownership to the FSF in the wake of the recent FSF calls around rms, which has put the GCC project in the position where the have the choices to:

1. Hope the FSF change their mind and prioritise free software ahead of the Cult of Richard.

2. Commit to shipping a sub-par and increasingly irrelevant free software compiler.

3. Drop the CLA requirement.

In the absence of any change on the first point, the third option looks like the best way to ensure that there is still a high-quality, GPL complier available.