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FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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So this sounds like a bad thing then...
Like if having gpl code in free bsd forced all these companies to be more open with their software, and now they can be more closed with it, isn't that bad?
It's a mixed bag.
The major companies that use it, contribute back to it (think Netflix, Sony, Apple, etc). If they didn't have a copyleft option, Sony and Apple would've built completely closed-source and wouldn't be contributing to anything. Netflix is different in that GPL wouldn't force them to disclose their modifications, they just preferred FreeBSD because of its networking stack, they would've probably just gone with Linux if FreeBSD didn't exist.
It's more of a symbolic thing. FreeBSD has removed the vast majority of gpl code over the last decades. I think this specific removal was just a last lingering overlap that was difficult to replace.
Is it bad? It's subjective. The project goals were always to be permissive. There was just historical borrowing from other open source projects.
I think both approaches are valid. GPL has fostered a greater number of maintainers and volunteer participants. That's definitely its shown strength but you can also attribute fragmentation to this. Whereas BSD has created much more focused and targeted distributions. I guess that's indirectly due to the license and more the smaller group of active contributors.
It's really difficult to rival FreeBSD at certain specific usecases. I wouldn't use anything else for a NAS or a router.
It's a very lopsided distro, bad gpu and wifi support. Limited application support. Really not ideal for a desktop, nor is it really meant to be used that way.
It allows freebsd to be true to the BSD license, and I agree with the author that it makes licensing easier. BSD will always be free and incredibly permissive, and I don't see this changing anything. But a lot of the strides that linux has made is because people need to release their changes.
BSD on the other hand doesn't require giving back, so you get Apple that was the largest company in the world building off of the work of FreeBSD. I certainly don't see FreeBSD being comparable to macOS like Fedora is to RHEL. It's more like Apple took what they wanted and walked away.
Counterpoint: Apple used (uses?) a lot of GPL code as well, but their “giving back” was so perfunctory that the community didn’t incorporate most of it.
Big companies will always find ways to skirt what is allowed in ways that benefits them alone.
There was an attempt back in the day to do something like that but it never went anywhere.
Yes, it's bad. Permissive licensing (instead of copyleft) is for cucks.
No no I just like seeing my work get used without any care or contribution back to create systems that absolutely don't care about the rights of the users too /s
Yes that's probably bad