Hacker News

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

77 points by lr0 ago | 28 comments

matheusmoreira [-]

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.

riedel |root |parent |next [-]

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.

2lup382_ |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

rzerowan |root |parent |next [-]

>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

Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.

What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.

When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.

So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.

matheusmoreira |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

jcranmer |root |parent |next [-]

The fundamental problem that most people want free software to solve isn't the user-level problem of "I want to tinker with all of the software I run," but the community-level problem of "I want to use the results of other people in getting software to run on my setup." In the context of a compiler, that's support for more esoteric architecture; in the context of a kernel, that's support for drivers for hardware.

The GPL doesn't actually solve the community-level problem very well (which is the basis of Linus's complaints about GPLv3--it positions the license much more directly in the direction of the user-level freedom rather than the community-level freedom). But the solution for the community-level problem involves a lot of social pressure, and it turns out that for a large open-source project, commit velocity means that most proprietary companies find the easiest way to deal with the open-source upstream is to contribute their code to the community to make it everybody else's problem to maintain.

You can see this in the development of LLVM, e.g.: almost all of the proprietary compilers are LLVM-based (especially as EDG has finally thrown in the towel, everyone using EDG is going to look to rebasing onto clang instead). And yet the companies with their proprietary forks of LLVM are still major upstream contributors.

2lup382_ |root |parent |previous [-]

> 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.

matheusmoreira |root |parent [-]

> now we can just focus on hacking

Well, I can't do that. Releasing software under permissive licenses is just wealth transfer from well meaning hackers straight into the pockets of corporations. It just gives it all away, no questions asked.

For me it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. I'm trending towards the latter now. I'm starting to question whether I should even publish my work.

ksec |root |parent |next |previous [-]

>Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice.

That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.

matheusmoreira |root |parent [-]

It's not a suggestion, it's a fact. BSD is permissive open source software, not copyleft free software.

mikece |root |parent |next |previous [-]

On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?

bigfishrunning |root |parent |next [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent |next [-]

how so? could you please elaborate?

close04 |root |parent |next [-]

It’s becoming too mainstream is what they mean. Any other not immediately obvious parallel to Windows would have warranted an explanation from the get go.

felixgallo |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

close04 |root |parent [-]

Your 1 user issue is not proof of anything that follows, and most of the comment looks more like getting some aggressive frustration out.

Just to be clear, you’re not entirely wrong. Linux is not about being simple and comprehensible anymore because that only serves a small subset of users. As the userbase grew, the needs and demands grew with it and so did the solution. But your problem isn’t a sign of “becoming shit” more than finding some hardware not supported by *BSD justifies some rant about its developers.

naturalmovement |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

sitzkrieg |root |parent |next [-]

linux userspace has always sucked ass

matheusmoreira |root |parent |previous [-]

> 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.

isx726552 |root |parent |previous [-]

*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 |root |parent [-]

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...

rbanffy |root |parent |next [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

If it were a GPLv3 OS, it's likely that they would have chosen something else.

JackSlateur |root |parent [-]

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

pengaru |root |parent |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.