GCC is a more complete implementation of the C++ standard than either Borland C++ OR Visual C++. IF you want to create a COMMERCIAL application WHICH USES GCC-SPECIFIC libraries and routines, that is libraries which are not part of the Standard, like iostream or string or cmath, not part of older UNIX such as ncurses or termcap (which I believe Windows has too), or aren't third party THEN you must publish the source code freely so anyone may change and redistribute it if it almost suits their needs. ID Software did this with Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1 2 and 3 and Wolfenstein and return to Wolfenstein. People still bought them to get the graphics and maps but they got UNIX customers they wouldn't have otherwise that way. Generally, however, you need to go pretty far into programming or have a strong interest in FOSS for the restriction to kick in.
The reason ID used open source was until recently there weren't very many Windows-specific tools for the cutting edge animation and game creation. Even today, there are mainly Windows tools for creating Windows games -- such as games which use DirectX rather than the Industry Standard OpenGL. Microsoft does not support OpenGL, but Apple, Sun, IBM and many other companies do. The thing is, we don't use computers the same way. One obvious thing to do is if you live in a small to midsized city, go to a festival of animation short films (if it has Sally Cruikshank that's even better). I got my degree in painting, and will on occasion make very short animations. When I show them to engineers or animators they roll their eyes. But even many Sunday Painters will look at them and say things like "That's neat. How did you get that yellow pixel to run like that." I spend hours figuring out how to exploit what "professionals" call accidents or "artifacts". UNIX is not as widely used as it used to be in the networks which go into enterprise projects like animation and games -- but the projects and software which have suffered most are the proprietary UNIX packages. The various Open Source licenses -- GPL, FreeBSD (which even Microsoft uses some packages -- internally -- which are released under ) and so forth cover a lot more in business than they did before Microsoft made their push for networking.
That's why I think you should try GCC. NOT Dev-C++, though, but CygWin.
http://www.cygwin.com/
It is actually not connected with Linux in any way. It is a great way to find out if you are actually interested in computer science.
Another neat program is the rapid prototyping interpreter tk/tcl:
http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/