They would not have been. The way
Paizo people have described it, the process went something like this.
- Hmm, Wizards sure are dragging their feet on revealing both the licensing agreement for the new edition and allowing that look into the rules they promised 3PPs. We should probably look into backup plans.
- Hey, they're having an open playtest of 4e at the D&D Experience in February. Let's send Jason Bulmahn over to check it out.
- Bulmahn, upon return: "Nope nope nope." That's not what we want to write for. We need to do something else, and right time to start working on it would be six months ago.
- Hey Jason, didn't you have a variant 3.5e rules set you were working on? Can we take that and expand to a full game?
Now, it's possible that if the GSL hadn't been so toxic, and if Pathfinder hadn't been such a success, the folks at Paizo might have changed their minds eventually. But the original decision to create the Pathfinder RPG (as opposed to the Pathfinder Adventure Paths) was not based on the GSL, but on the distaste Paizo folks had for 4e.