The removal of GPL code from FreeBSD 16’s base system isn’t just housekeeping — it reflects a BSD vision of “software freedom” that differs from FSF, Gnu, and Linux.
If you want to own your own proprietary BSD system without having to work for it, FreeBSD 16 — which won’t be released until December, 2027 — should make that easy-peasy. Michael Larabel, the publisher of Phoronix who makes it his business to know such things, reported on Wednesday that the last piece of GPL licensed code has been removed from the source tree for FreeBSD 16.
This is actually something of a technicality built on top of a technicality.
The last GPL code standing was ‘dialog,’ found in the FreeBSD installer. Dialog is a userland utility built on top of ncurses, which was used to draw the menus, forms, message boxes, and prompts that the installer used to interact with users in the terminal. FreeBSD replaced it with bsddialog, a BSD‑licensed clone providing similar terminal widgets, so the installer could keep the same UI behavior without depending on GPL/LGPL code.
The move from dialog to bsddialog happened a while back in the installer, although another similar tool — dpv — continues to use dialog. That tool has now been retired from FreeBSD 16, although the operating system’s most current production ready release, FreeBSD 15, continues to make dpv available as a tool, although it’s not actively used by the system.
The removal of GPL code is important because a lot of BSD people have a different view on “software freedom” than the rest of us. To many in the BSD crowd, “freedom” means the freedom to make the software proprietary, as Steve Jobs did to create NeXTSTEP and OS X. To create a proprietary operating system out of a BSD operating systemany GPL code must to be removed, because GPL code can’t be released under a proprietary license.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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