With a recent change that removed dialog in favor of bsddialog, FreeBSD has now retired the last piece of GPL-licensed code in its base system. Although the impact of this change will be minor for users, it does highlight once again the Open Source divide that has split developers since the 1990s, when [Linus Torvalds] attached a scribbled set of notes to the v0.01 Linux kernel release that would later be replaced with the very similar GPL license and its derivatives.

This history and its impacts are also the subject of a recent video by [Brodie Robertson]. For the FreeBSD project the biggest change here is probably that the entire GNU subtree in the codebase is now gone, As detailed in the video, this is the end of a very long-running project, whereby FreeBSD in its early days incorporated GNU code for userland tools. These components and its replacements are detailed in the FreeBSD wiki.

Naturally, this change has upset some people for reasons best known to themselves, but from a project management perspective this makes a lot of sense. Not having BSD-incompatible licenses like GPL in your source code massively simplifies matters. The main difference being that the GPL is reciprocal, requiring that derivative works also be released under the GPL — a feature that is often at odds with commercial projects. Meanwhile, the BSD licenses merely require the use of BSD-licensed code to be declared.

The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.

Although the OSS licensing flamewars will likely never end, it’s hard to disagree that FreeBSD is pretty healthy at over thirty years old, even if using it as a desktop OS comes with a few asterisks.