posted in Technology
FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code
hackaday.com/2026/07/28/freebsd-just-removed-the-last-of-its-gpl-licensed-code/
HackadayFreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed CodeWith a recent change that removed dialog in favor of bsddialog, FreeBSD has now retired the last piece of GPL-licensed code in its base system. Although the impact of this change will be minor for …The upshot of the BSD-license in the case of FreeBSD is that it has found it and its components used in many commercial products, including MacOS/OS X, the PlayStation’s Orbis OS, and of course the BSD networking stack is happily used in Windows, macOS and just about anywhere else. Meanwhile the GPL forced Linksys to open the firmware to its WRT54G series of routers, ultimately leading to the development of OpenWrt and similar projects.
They make it sound like the *WRTs were the worst thing to happen to consumer networking and that corporations not being required to contribute back to projects has made BSD stronger, rather than given companies free labor. I find the *BSDs to be pretty interesting, but let’s not pretend that they’re benefiting from companies using their work. Very shilly tone to this article.
Replying to @cenzorrll@piefed.ca
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?
Replying to @Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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.