For the history buffs:

  - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/gnu.gcc/NeXT$20and$20copyleft

  - https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/gnu.gcc/Objective-C$20front$20end$20for$20GCC$20from$20NeXT

I do not see Steve mentioned anywhere (http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/OSCON-2011/compliance.html makes that link, but IMO lacks argumentation).

It is hard to tell, but it seems that there were a few months where a pure preprocessor was (getting?) integrated into gcc, where the idea was to ship gcc sources with a NeXT licensed library to users, and have those users do the linking step, thus preventing NeXT from breaking the GPL. One could argue that this was one of the things that, eventually, led to the library exception to the GPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Vers...)