FreeBSD Continues Work On Ridding Its Base Of GPL-Licensed Software

[horizonbrave]

fuck this shit californian bsd hippy nerdy hilly billies, I guess this idiots must be on some shit face pay book

[ThoreauHD]

I don't really have any skin in this game either way.

I particularly stopped caring once millions of christians and muslims in camps were used to make bsd/apple's products. The laws of nature exist, whether you believe in them or not.

So yes, please separate yourselves completely from source code accountability. It's long overdue.

[grigi]

Seems to me to be the most useless thing you can do. GPL played a vital role in giving us free access to software. Free as in everyone had to work together, not free as in free to steal someone else's work.
I remember when FreeBSD was better, but few companies wanted to invest in it so that other people can steal your work and call it your own. Hence they stagnated and Linux improved.

[jabl]

FWIW, it's pretty hard to see the point in getting rid of gcov or dialog either. Neither of these are deeply integrated with anything, they are just ordinary programs running in userspace. There is nothing preventing them from integrating their preferred libraries, if those actually offer any benefit; but it seems in reality to be a silly endeavor with no particular benefit aside from "feeling copyfree" about things that aren't worth embedding in the first place.

AFAICS a lot of the FreeBSD users are companies making embedded systems or appliances, and are wary of accidentally exposing themselves to liability due to the GPL (see e.g. the WRT54G saga, or the busybox lawsuits). OTOH, if they think the GPL is fine, why use FreeBSD in the first place instead of Linux?

Secondly, IIRC FreeBSD has a GPLv3 ban in the base system, so whatever GNU tools they have in base are stuck at the last GPLv2 versions, which by this point are unmaintained and pretty old. So it makes sense for them to seek out alternatives.

[CommunityMember]

The OS is on brink of irrelevancy

While Linux is certainly going to be front and center to those participating on sites such as Phoronix, the BSDs do have a strong presence in the server and embedded marketplace (all your Netflix videos are served from various Netflix appliances running FreeBSD, and there is a good chance the bits to render this page went across an ISP using Juniper routers which use FreeBSD as their core OS).

[jabl]

GPL played a vital role in giving us free access to software. Free as in everyone had to work together, not free as in free to steal someone else's work.

I think RMS and the FSF played an instrumental role in raising awareness of the value of free software. However, it was open source that became mainstream, not free software. To an extent, I think the dynamic is different these days, in that companies more often see the advantages in collaborating on software development via open source rather than seeing open source developers as suckers to be taken advantage of.

Another more unfortunate reason for the demise of free software vs open source is that changes in the landscape has made copyleft licensing irrelevant in many cases. On the smaller end of the spectrum, the rejection of GPLv3 by most critical projects (in particular, the Linux kernel) has meant that locked down devices powered by ostensibly free software have become increasingly common. And also, many embedded devices are made by short-lived drive-by operations in China; good luck prosecuting them for GPL violations. On the other end of the spectrum, the wholesale rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, has enabled the SAAS providers to "proprietarize" free software.

I remember when FreeBSD was better, but few companies wanted to invest in it so that other people can steal your work and call it your own. Hence they stagnated and Linux improved.

There are other potential explanations for why Linux became #1 and not FreeBSD, but unfortunately we don't have parallel universes to run experiments in, so I guess we'll never know for sure. E.g.

• The BSD lawsuits casting a shadow over the BSD landscape for the critical early years when Linux gained mindshare
• Governance structure. The BSD codebases tended to be jealously guarded by a small cabal, which slowed down contributions, and disagreements tended to be resolved by forking the entire thing, which is how we got all those *BSD's, and further split the development effort.

[FellowPenguin]

Use BSD license if you don't mind that some corporation will use your code in their proprietary software to make money and will give you nothing in return.

[grigi]

I think RMS and the FSF played an instrumental role in raising awareness of the value of free software. However, it was open source that became mainstream, not free software. To an extent, I think the dynamic is different these days, in that companies more often see the advantages in collaborating on software development via open source rather than seeing open source developers as suckers to be taken advantage of.

Another more unfortunate reason for the demise of free software vs open source is that changes in the landscape has made copyleft licensing irrelevant in many cases. On the smaller end of the spectrum, the rejection of GPLv3 by most critical projects (in particular, the Linux kernel) has meant that locked down devices powered by ostensibly free software have become increasingly common. And also, many embedded devices are made by short-lived drive-by operations in China; good luck prosecuting them for GPL violations. On the other end of the spectrum, the wholesale rejection of AGPL by, well, more or less everybody, has enabled the SAAS providers to "proprietarize" free software.



There are other potential explanations for why Linux became #1 and not FreeBSD, but unfortunately we don't have parallel universes to run experiments in, so I guess we'll never know for sure. E.g.

• The BSD lawsuits casting a shadow over the BSD landscape for the critical early years when Linux gained mindshare
• Governance structure. The BSD codebases tended to be jealously guarded by a small cabal, which slowed down contributions, and disagreements tended to be resolved by forking the entire thing, which is how we got all those *BSD's, and further split the development effort.

That's a very thorough response.
I was specifically talking of the situation when I entered the scene around the year 2000, but you are right GPL has been largely worked around.
RMS and FSF was doing very good work around that time. (although some of his idiosyncrasies was already mocked at that time)

The governance structure of the BSD's was for me the biggest issue.

The current open-source model is highly dependent on a culture that respects copyright and credits, not patents, and the risk becomes when that culture changes.
Eric Raymond did a few good writeups about this.

Agreed that the changes that GPLv3 made pushed people too far as it not only tried to clarify the spirit of the "GPLv2 or later", but also broke it. It should have not tried to extend the reach of basic GPL.

Instead, I think if RMS actually opened a discussion instead of used force it would be a different situation.

AGPL is troublesome as it tries to be full on public domain to the point that it excludes commercial work on it. I think it was always supposed to be a niche license.

[Awesomeness]

It's always a delight to see anti-GPL conspiracy theorists from the BSD camp with their Stop RMS signs and Anti Systemd t-shirts leaving their echo chamber and acting as if they were the pragmatic bunch, as if any Linux distribution had ever tried to remove all BSD/MIT-licensed software. This is going to be fun. 🍿🍿🍿

[skeevy420]

BSD's are different to Linux in that the scope is a lot larger. Where as Linux is just released as as a standalone kernel the BSD's include userspace tools that are typical in POSIX/nix along with the kernel (in Linux this is completely separate)

So for them its a bigger deal because BSD;s will typically fix user space programs so them getting rid of GPL here has its benefits.

Fun fact, this perk of BSD's also means they are able to break interfaces and fix interfaces since they control both the kernel and the nix/POSIX environment and bundle them together. As an example, Linux still has to keep broken interfaces/tools because Linux doesn't want to break userspace where as these typically get fixed in BSD, the ehto0/wlan0 naming scheme is an example of this.

Exactly. BSD is the kernel + the core system where as Linux is just the kernel. That's why shit breaks when the Linux kernel updates.

A lot of people tend to forget how viral the GPL can be and how GPL code can be risky to use in commercial products. If one dumbass junior dev doesn't track a change to a make file then the entire company risks a GPL violation for not documenting them changing a 1 to a 2.

This change also matters in regards to compiling the base system and how linking is done. If the GPL is out of the loop you don't have to worry about linking and license violations during compilation.

What's funny is FreeBSD covers damn near all that I want my desktop to do these days. Even games are starting to work. After doing a bit of reading last night the biggest hurdle I think I'd have seems to be Wine/Proton multiarch.