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

The FreeBSD project today published its Q4-2020 status report concerning all the interesting happenings for this open-source BSD operating system.

Even with the pandemic, the FreeBSD developers have been as busy as ever advancing their software. Among the highlights for the past quarter in the FreeBSD world include:

- Continued work on removing GPL software from FreeBSD base in order to "migrate to modern, copyfree or more permissively licensed components." Some of the latest GPL-licensed items removed in favor of more permissive licenses includes replacing the GDB debugger with LLVM's LLDB, GNUgrep with BSDgrep, and dropping libgnuregex. Replacements for GNU dialog and gcov are also being sought. (GDB does remain available via FreeBSD Ports for those preferring the GNU Debugger.)

- Linuxulator for the Linux binary compatibility layer continues work on getting more GUI desktop applications working besides the fairly good CLI applications support.

- Updating the default compiler toolchain to LLVM Clang 11.

- Continued work on getting Intel WiFi support in good shape for FreeBSD.

- Continued work around FreeBSD 13.0 that is coming out in the months ahead and their first release since moving from Subversion to Git for development.

- USB4 support for FreeBSD is being worked on but not yet complete/working for users.

- Continuing to improve the ARM / AArch64 support for FreeBSD.

- The FreeBSD Foundation provided grants around OpenZFS Zstd support, Linuxulator improvements for Linux application binary compatibility, LLDB target work, WiFi improvements, and more.

See the lengthy list of updates for Q4'2020 via the report on FreeBSD.org.