>The people who campaign for GPL software authors to change their license seem to assume that the authors of the software naively chose the GPL, as opposed to choosing it for its particular spirit.

Many do. Any many of them realize they didn't actually want the GPL, they just picked the license they had heard of the most. I don't see what this has to do with the discussion of gcc being limited technically because the GPL is not enough to sufficiently hinder people from writing proprietary tools.

>That's really important distinction that people don't realize about the GPL - it's designed to protect the rights of the END USERS

That is an artificial distinction created to try to justify the newspeak meaning of "freedom" where it is defined to mean "imposes restrictions". Developers are users.