5 ms·

FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System

99 points by lr0 3mo ago

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
- mikece 3mo ago
  On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
  - isx726552 3mo ago
    *BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin… But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
    - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
      FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
      - throw0101d 3mo ago
        * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
      - rbanffy 3mo ago
        One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        If it were a GPLv3 OS, it's likely that they would have chosen something else.
        JackSlateur 3mo ago
        Would that have been a bad thing ? Between a proprietary OS on which we cannot do anything and an opensource-based OS on which we cannot do anything .. I'd argue that making the company paying the bill would be more healthy
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        The two arguments against that 1) People writing BSD licensed software want people to use it, and don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) 2) "the company" never pays the bill. It is always passed to their customers in one way or another.
        rbanffy 3mo ago
        > don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) Also don’t care about their users having the same rights they enjoyed getting software written by someone else (for free!) and making some changes before their customers could pay to use it.
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
    - jjav 3mo ago
      Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
      - asimovfan 3mo ago
        how so? could you please elaborate?
        felixgallo 3mo ago
        As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang. Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee. This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.
  - naturalmovement 3mo ago
    No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
    - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux What enshittification? > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
    - sitzkrieg 3mo ago
      linux userspace has always sucked ass
      - setopt 3mo ago
        In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
    - einsteinx2 3mo ago
      > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux This is a ridiculous stretch of the term > With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines. > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole. This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
    - vinceguidry 3mo ago
      When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.
  - coaksford 3mo ago
    As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.
- riedel 3mo ago
  I am not really sure if I can follow. FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software. BSD has a different history and it's "own licence". Being more consistent in its licence is a good thing particularly in contrast to Linux FreeBSD is a full distribution with user land. I would even think that you can without much problem publish a GPL version of FreeBSD if you like. I think you might have to leave out some CDDL stuff. FreeBSD has its value as an appliance OS (e.g. for firewalls or NAS) and FreeBSD has profited also from vendors contributing back: it is just another ecosystem . Personally I totally respect GPL and AGPL licenced software. The sad news is that without any fix in law, AI rewrites will kill GPL eventually, but then again also proprietary binaries can be decompiled and modified, so maybe there is still a win for freeing software in the game.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    The point is GNU software used to be ubiquitous. Even people who were averse to the GPL would rather tolerate it than reinvent the software themselves. That's leverage. Looks like that era is over.
  - Gud 3mo ago
    FreeBSD is absolutely Free Software.
  - vmilner 3mo ago
    > FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software The FSF disagree: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
    - riedel 3mo ago
      I don't think FSF would disagree. As I said most parts are fully GPL compatible licenced. However, my comment was about the ideology/philosophical background. > “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. [0] I would say that FreeBSD is the prototypical open source OS. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- pengaru 3mo ago
  FreeBSD has never played a significant role in the Free Software Movement. Frankly I'm surprised there was any GPL code at all in the FreeBSD base repo in 2026.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Didn't say they did. Just lamenting the movement's lack of leverage. The whole idea was to build strong copyleft software and leverage all that into copylefting even more software. Obviously, it doesn't work if it's easy enough to just replace the copyleft software, which is exactly what this news is all about.
- 2lup382_ 3mo ago
  I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler suite at some points. So if you're $MEGACORP you could either a) buy a proprietary compiler, b) pay for rarified (so expensive) talent to write your own, c) tolerate the terms imposed by the GPL. Most companies saw option "C" as the more cost effective one. Now there is a lot of computer science talent out there, so the price of option "B" goes way down. Why tolerate the GPL when I can hire any of the people laid off from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, come work for me, and all of them probably wrote a compiler in college and I get to own the code outright. Or, I can use FreeBSD, LLVM, whatever, and maybe there is a chance for $MEGACORP to contribute back, where in option "B" there is almost no chance. And this doesn't even take LLMs into consideration.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers. Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind to trivial.
    - 2lup382_ 3mo ago
      > used to have so much more leverage back then And maybe that was required back then, and/or maybe it ended up being bad strategy in the long term. Leverage only gets you so far, especially in community and relationships. > Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. See I feel the exact opposite. As FOSS license choice matters less, now we can just focus on hacking. FreeBSD doing this is a great example of it.
      - 3mo ago
- ksec 3mo ago
  >Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    It's not a suggestion, it's a fact. BSD is permissive open source software, not copyleft free software.
    - ZirconiumX 3mo ago
      > [The FreeBSD license] is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
      - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
        https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... > The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. > However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. > The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. > By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. > This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.
        ksec 3mo ago
        It is great that you post and quoted this. In which I suggest you reread the page yourself. It make the case very clear. There are literally 4 - 5 paragraphs on the whole thing with examples what is considered free software. Directly from RMS himself. >Another misunderstanding of “open source” is the idea that it means “not using the GNU GPL.” This tends to accompany another misunderstanding that “free software” means “GPL-covered software.” These are both mistaken, since the GNU GPL qualifies as an open source license and most of the open source licenses qualify as free software licenses[1]. There are many free software licenses* aside from the GNU GPL. * And in [1], >Modified BSD license (#ModifiedBSD) This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. >This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license. I actually originally asked on what you were suggesting because the idea that BSD is not Free software died a more than decade ago. That is the whole reason why Stallman wrote the page and even mentioned Rust as an example. Along with issues came up from Tivo etc. I am surprised it is now rising up again. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

99 points by lr0 3mo ago

Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.

mikece 3mo ago
On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
- isx726552 3mo ago
  *BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin… But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
  - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
    - throw0101d 3mo ago
      * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
      - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        If it were a GPLv3 OS, it's likely that they would have chosen something else.
        JackSlateur 3mo ago
        Would that have been a bad thing ? Between a proprietary OS on which we cannot do anything and an opensource-based OS on which we cannot do anything .. I'd argue that making the company paying the bill would be more healthy
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        The two arguments against that 1) People writing BSD licensed software want people to use it, and don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) 2) "the company" never pays the bill. It is always passed to their customers in one way or another.
        rbanffy 3mo ago
        > don't really care about any reciprocal contribution (or else they would write copyleft-licensed software) Also don’t care about their users having the same rights they enjoyed getting software written by someone else (for free!) and making some changes before their customers could pay to use it.
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
  - jjav 3mo ago
    Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
    - asimovfan 3mo ago
      how so? could you please elaborate?
      - felixgallo 3mo ago
        As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang. Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee. This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.
- naturalmovement 3mo ago
  No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux What enshittification? > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
  - sitzkrieg 3mo ago
    linux userspace has always sucked ass
    - setopt 3mo ago
      In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
  - einsteinx2 3mo ago
    > As enshittification encroaches onto Linux This is a ridiculous stretch of the term > With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines. > Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole. This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
  - vinceguidry 3mo ago
    When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.
- coaksford 3mo ago
  As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.
riedel 3mo ago
I am not really sure if I can follow. FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software. BSD has a different history and it's "own licence". Being more consistent in its licence is a good thing particularly in contrast to Linux FreeBSD is a full distribution with user land. I would even think that you can without much problem publish a GPL version of FreeBSD if you like. I think you might have to leave out some CDDL stuff. FreeBSD has its value as an appliance OS (e.g. for firewalls or NAS) and FreeBSD has profited also from vendors contributing back: it is just another ecosystem . Personally I totally respect GPL and AGPL licenced software. The sad news is that without any fix in law, AI rewrites will kill GPL eventually, but then again also proprietary binaries can be decompiled and modified, so maybe there is still a win for freeing software in the game.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  The point is GNU software used to be ubiquitous. Even people who were averse to the GPL would rather tolerate it than reinvent the software themselves. That's leverage. Looks like that era is over.
- Gud 3mo ago
  FreeBSD is absolutely Free Software.
- vmilner 3mo ago
  > FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software The FSF disagree: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
  - riedel 3mo ago
    I don't think FSF would disagree. As I said most parts are fully GPL compatible licenced. However, my comment was about the ideology/philosophical background. > “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. [0] I would say that FreeBSD is the prototypical open source OS. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
pengaru 3mo ago
FreeBSD has never played a significant role in the Free Software Movement. Frankly I'm surprised there was any GPL code at all in the FreeBSD base repo in 2026.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Didn't say they did. Just lamenting the movement's lack of leverage. The whole idea was to build strong copyleft software and leverage all that into copylefting even more software. Obviously, it doesn't work if it's easy enough to just replace the copyleft software, which is exactly what this news is all about.
2lup382_ 3mo ago
I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler suite at some points. So if you're $MEGACORP you could either a) buy a proprietary compiler, b) pay for rarified (so expensive) talent to write your own, c) tolerate the terms imposed by the GPL. Most companies saw option "C" as the more cost effective one. Now there is a lot of computer science talent out there, so the price of option "B" goes way down. Why tolerate the GPL when I can hire any of the people laid off from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, come work for me, and all of them probably wrote a compiler in college and I get to own the code outright. Or, I can use FreeBSD, LLVM, whatever, and maybe there is a chance for $MEGACORP to contribute back, where in option "B" there is almost no chance. And this doesn't even take LLMs into consideration.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers. Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind to trivial.
  - 2lup382_ 3mo ago
    > used to have so much more leverage back then And maybe that was required back then, and/or maybe it ended up being bad strategy in the long term. Leverage only gets you so far, especially in community and relationships. > Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. See I feel the exact opposite. As FOSS license choice matters less, now we can just focus on hacking. FreeBSD doing this is a great example of it.
    - 3mo ago
ksec 3mo ago
>Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  It's not a suggestion, it's a fact. BSD is permissive open source software, not copyleft free software.
  - ZirconiumX 3mo ago
    > [The FreeBSD license] is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
    - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... > The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. > However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. > The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. > By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. > This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.
      - ksec 3mo ago
        It is great that you post and quoted this. In which I suggest you reread the page yourself. It make the case very clear. There are literally 4 - 5 paragraphs on the whole thing with examples what is considered free software. Directly from RMS himself. >Another misunderstanding of “open source” is the idea that it means “not using the GNU GPL.” This tends to accompany another misunderstanding that “free software” means “GPL-covered software.” These are both mistaken, since the GNU GPL qualifies as an open source license and most of the open source licenses qualify as free software licenses[1]. There are many free software licenses* aside from the GNU GPL. * And in [1], >Modified BSD license (#ModifiedBSD) This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. >This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license. I actually originally asked on what you were suggesting because the idea that BSD is not Free software died a more than decade ago. That is the whole reason why Stallman wrote the page and even mentioned Rust as an example. Along with issues came up from Tivo etc. I am surprised it is now rising up again. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html