Not Even a Contender (Score 1)

You are apparently unfamiliar with Digital's engineering. If you don't want proprietary software, fine. That wasn't the argument. But if you have an alpha, Digital's CC runs faster and produces significantly faster code. And digital software is among the most bug-free I've ever encountered. No, nobody's perfect, but they're damned close. Open-source compilers are great if one of two conditions are satisfied: 1) you are a compiler engineer with experience on the platform, or 2) there are lots of people like that out there with an interest in the program. For gcc/alpha, the pool is very small. It hasn't been tuned to the same degree that the intel versions have.

And part of the reason for that is that the compiler exploits characteristics of the processor that Digital (and now Compaq) might legitimately want to keep secret.