At the time, C++ compilers costing money was normal (Microsoft, Borland), and those were physical products (CD-ROMs, printed manuals), so it seems semi-plausible she could have acted as an intermediary with the help of her parents.

My experience with Chinese universities was that they had their own ecosystem to "obtain" Western software. They didn't need an intermediary.

I was in high school around the same time as Holmes and recall using g++ as our compiler. This was on Linux, though.

I know. I wouldn’t put it past her being business-savvy enough to sell the Chinese g++. :)

Yeah, was trying to find out more about that before, couldn't find anything. Now, the journalist wrote a followup about how he'd been mislead, and maybe that was part of the misinformation... but if it was it was a deeply weird thing to make up. Holmes is about the same age as me, and when I was in high school there were definitely free C++ compilers, even for Windows (I vaguely remember messing around with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJGPP, and Borland also had a shareware C++ compiler...)