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If you read the entire GCC source code and then create a compatible compiler, it's not clean room. Which Opus basically did since, I'm assuming, its training set contained the entire source of GCC. So even if they were actively referencing GCC I think that counts.

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What if you just read the entire GCC source code in school 15 years ago? Is that not clean room?

No.

I'd argue that no one would really care given it's GCC.

But if you worked for GiantSodaCo on their secret recipe under NDA, then create a new soda company 15 years later that tastes suspiciously similar to GiantSodaCo, you'd probably have legal issues. It would be hard to argue that you weren't using proprietary knowledge in that case.

Given that GCC is not public domain, the copyright holders will probably care.

I read the source. If anything it takes concepts from LLVM more than GCC, but the similarities aren't very deep.

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