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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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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.