No. It's not that at all. The GCC/LLVM debate has nothing whatsoever to do with licensing, but crippling the design of gcc for political aims. Educate yourself on the subject.
Educate yourself before questioning others level of understanding.
The GCC has an plugin system, but not one that allows proprietary modules. The people that care about that distinction only do so because of the licensing difference between GPL and proprietary licensing.
I can't claim to know anything about GCC's internals, but from what I know/read, it does have a plugin system and I don't see any indication of that being held back for political reasons (there are many other potential reasons for technical inferiority).
And I don't see how the FSF could ever have furthered their political goals by making it technically hard to use GCC in free software tools, quite the contrary. Would be quite interested in evidence of that.
I think I get what you mean now, you said above that GCC doesn't want to give external tools access to intermediate formats. But is that really the "anti plugin policy" esr is talking about?
RMS says "freedom" is worth sacrificing functionality for. GCC is a monolithic mess of shit that is virtually impossible to debug, and produces incorrect code very frequently. Being forced into a terrible architecture where everything is smushed into everything else just to prevent people from being able to use gcc as a front end and something else as a backend is absolutely a case of making the code worse for the sake of trying to further a political agenda.
