GCC was created as part of the GNU Project but has grown to operate as an autonomous project.
That is true for all GNU project. The GCC Steering Committee has decided to relax the requirement to assign copyright for all changes to the Free Software Foundation. GCC will continue to be developed, distributed, and licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. GCC will now accept contributions with or without an FSF copyright assignment. This change is consistent with the practices of many other major Free Software projects, such as the Linux kernel. The GCC steering committee is not in a position to make such a decision that is up to the GNU project head and the FSF legal counsel, it also fly against the mission statement. Not to mention that this was not discussed with anyone, including people in the GNU project.
