Link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-16-Goes-GPL-Free

As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired.

The dialog implementation was the last piece of GNU GPL licensed software in FreeBSD's base system. The FreeBSD installer previously transitioned to using bsddialog in place of dialog and then dpv was the last user of dialog but itself since turned off and now retired.

This ticket to retire dialog was opened back in February while is now merged to the FreeBSD source tree for what will become FreeBSD 16.0.

With dialog removed, the latest FreeBSD code now retires the GNU sub-tree of the FreeBSD base system now that no more GNU code remains.

FreeBSD 16.0 is working its way toward release that is expected to happen in December 2027.

I understand why are they trying to do so, but it still feels odd to see a project removing GPL'd code

If you don’t mind, could you to explain why exactly?

Is it a GPL3 thing? Or favouring their own BSD licences?

They're trying to make their own distro fully BSD-licensed, so that it can be distributed without end users having to deal with copyleft restrictions.

They're BSD after all.

Here's a chance I've got to rethink about copyleft.

To put it in perspective, all the capitalist shits hate it.

FreeBSD is a full OS separate from GNU and Linux. It’s not a distribution.

They favor permissive licenses ( BSD or MIT ).

Aside from that, they want to work on something different.

Happy cake day!

The concept of Unix-based distributions predates GNU/Linux by the way - BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution.

Yep. That is what the ‘D’ stands for, which is largely historical at this point, and originally, all code was shared code.

The shared code pool which spawned the BSD hasn’t existed in decades, and the BSDs have been stand alone operating systems since February 1994 when the USL lawsuit was settled with 4.4BSD-lite.

Thanks!