You do these tools for yourself and to scratch your own itch. As long as it fulfills its function, you get value. The fact that someone else may want to use it or the big vendor would like to adopt it should be secondary at best.

If you yourself don’t need such a tool and you also don’t want to do it as an exercise of the art, then don’t do it. Spend your time on something that’s gonna bring value to you instead.

You could release your code with a less permissive license (say excluding companies with a 1 trillion dollar market cap) so they at least have to play ball with you.

The GPLv3 might be enough to do that, for some. It was sufficient concern for Apple, who dumped Samba, bash, and gcc.

Microsoft's CBL/Mariner distribution of Linux would be the first place to look for GPLv3, and and impacts upon their patent portfolio (I haven't read up on the patent provisions).

"Apple, a user of GCC and a heavy user of both DRM and patents, switched the compiler in its Xcode IDE from GCC to Clang, which is another FOSS compiler but is under a permissive license. LWN speculated that Apple was motivated partly by a desire to avoid GPLv3. The Samba project also switched to GPLv3, so Apple replaced Samba in their software suite by a closed-source, proprietary software alternative."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#...

LLVM is also more modular. The front-end and back-ends are well decoupled and it’s possible to work on them separately. Useful for a company that has to target two CPU architectures.

I have heard that many optimizations that llvm can make are impossible in GCC.

I barely grasp yacc, but I understand that a more cohesive design, less burdened by history, can be greatly effective.

There is a group that is trying to rework Linux in such a way that it can be compiled by llvm clang. I wish them the best.

If these companies think they can get away with unlicensed use, they will. It’s you going broke because of a lawsuit, not them even if they lose.