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Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
I am not really sure if I can follow. FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software.
BSD has a different history and it's "own licence". Being more consistent in its licence is a good thing particularly in contrast to Linux FreeBSD is a full distribution with user land. I would even think that you can without much problem publish a GPL version of FreeBSD if you like. I think you might have to leave out some CDDL stuff. FreeBSD has its value as an appliance OS (e.g. for firewalls or NAS) and FreeBSD has profited also from vendors contributing back: it is just another ecosystem . Personally I totally respect GPL and AGPL licenced software. The sad news is that without any fix in law, AI rewrites will kill GPL eventually, but then again also proprietary binaries can be decompiled and modified, so maybe there is still a win for freeing software in the game.
The point is GNU software used to be ubiquitous. Even people who were averse to the GPL would rather tolerate it than reinvent the software themselves. That's leverage.
Looks like that era is over.
> FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software
The FSF disagree:
I don't think FSF would disagree. As I said most parts are fully GPL compatible licenced. However, my comment was about the ideology/philosophical background.
> “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. [0]
I would say that FreeBSD is the prototypical open source OS.
FreeBSD is absolutely Free Software.
I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler suite at some points. So if you're $MEGACORP you could either a) buy a proprietary compiler, b) pay for rarified (so expensive) talent to write your own, c) tolerate the terms imposed by the GPL. Most companies saw option "C" as the more cost effective one. Now there is a lot of computer science talent out there, so the price of option "B" goes way down. Why tolerate the GPL when I can hire any of the people laid off from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, come work for me, and all of them probably wrote a compiler in college and I get to own the code outright. Or, I can use FreeBSD, LLVM, whatever, and maybe there is a chance for $MEGACORP to contribute back, where in option "B" there is almost no chance. And this doesn't even take LLMs into consideration.
>I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL
Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.
What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.
When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.
I think companies figured out how to get around the GPL by simply not distributing software.
The user has a right to know what software runs on their machine? Screw that, we'll keep all the software (and now user data too) on our side, and the user can throw rest calls over the fence.
AGPLv3 is the answer to that.
> Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User.
I didn't say it was, but what it was written for and what it became since writing software has changed so radically are two different things. For example the kernel Linux used to be written primarily by hobbyist hackers, now it is in large part written by $MEGACORP.
> When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
Doesn't the progress of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) fly in the face of that? It only gets better with age, adds new features, and manages to do so while being permissively licensed.
Apologies if it came across as accusatory , not the intent. A lot of the people within the ecosystem however view it as such a s the primary beneficiary of corps and individuals an afterthough if at all.
For the BSDs they still have the problem see FreeBSD getting it bits reused by Sony/Apple etc with very littke to show back in terms of code. They do give grants of support however if they solved a code issue that the open code struggles with. It will never see the light of day as their chnages are propreitery as the licensing allown.
Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers.
Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind to trivial.
The fundamental problem that most people want free software to solve isn't the user-level problem of "I want to tinker with all of the software I run," but the community-level problem of "I want to use the results of other people in getting software to run on my setup." In the context of a compiler, that's support for more esoteric architecture; in the context of a kernel, that's support for drivers for hardware.
The GPL doesn't actually solve the community-level problem very well (which is the basis of Linus's complaints about GPLv3--it positions the license much more directly in the direction of the user-level freedom rather than the community-level freedom). But the solution for the community-level problem involves a lot of social pressure, and it turns out that for a large open-source project, commit velocity means that most proprietary companies find the easiest way to deal with the open-source upstream is to contribute their code to the community to make it everybody else's problem to maintain.
You can see this in the development of LLVM, e.g.: almost all of the proprietary compilers are LLVM-based (especially as EDG has finally thrown in the towel, everyone using EDG is going to look to rebasing onto clang instead). And yet the companies with their proprietary forks of LLVM are still major upstream contributors.
> used to have so much more leverage back then
And maybe that was required back then, and/or maybe it ended up being bad strategy in the long term. Leverage only gets you so far, especially in community and relationships.
> Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore.
See I feel the exact opposite. As FOSS license choice matters less, now we can just focus on hacking. FreeBSD doing this is a great example of it.
> now we can just focus on hacking
Well, I can't do that. Releasing software under permissive licenses is just wealth transfer from well meaning hackers straight into the pockets of corporations. It just gives it all away, no questions asked.
For me it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. I'm trending towards the latter now. I'm starting to question whether I should even publish my work.
> For me it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. I'm trending towards the latter now.
Then for you it was never about freedom and community, which were the two major goals the Free Software movement were founded on, it was about leveraging copyleft for income generation. Everyone needs to make a living, and that is totally fine, but when you say "Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice [sic]." what you really meant was "pretty sad from the perspective of using this license to generate income". Which, again, no judgement, it just changes the meaning of your post.
> Releasing software under permissive licenses is just wealth transfer from well meaning hackers straight into the pockets of corporations.
That is nonsense. A permissively licensed piece of software is every bit as free and a gift to the commons as a copyleft licensed piece of software. Yes, corporations get to use it, but so does everyone else. Free software was never about "fuck them corporations", it was about giving your work to others in order that all might benefit. Permissive licensing does that just fine.
On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!
Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
how so? could you please elaborate?
As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang.
Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee.
This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.
It’s becoming too mainstream is what they mean. Any other not immediately obvious parallel to Windows would have warranted an explanation from the get go.
Try e.g. Void Linux, it's built by BSD-inclined people and is also refreshingly simpler than most big distros. (It's my daily driver for the last 8 years.)
But if you want tighter integration of userland and kernel, I suppose what RedHat is doing is closer to that. They pursue a non-Unix way though: an immutable distro, ideally only running systemd and podman in the userland, put everything into containers.
As someone who very reluctantly fits that description, yes but no. I don't love FreeBSD any less or want to use it any less than anytime in the last 20 years, nor do I like Linux any more than at any time in the last 20 years (less, if anything). But NixOS is the "killer app" that has me on Linux instead of FreeBSD. If either FreeBSD gets a really good NixOS-like setup, or Linux-based NixOS becomes unmaintained, I'm happily going back to FreeBSD again, it has always been excellent and stable to me.
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux
What enshittification?
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together
Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
> As enshittification encroaches onto Linux
This is a ridiculous stretch of the term
> With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer.
ZFS works fine on root on Linux. I use it on multiple machines.
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
This has quite literally always been the case and seems intentional. Linux is the kernel only, others supply the userland of their choice (aka a Linux distribution).
linux userspace has always sucked ass
In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
*BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin…
But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.
FreeBSD's license means it shows up in a lot of unexpected places -- the last two Sony Playstations run a FreeBSD derived OS for instance. It's around, more then you think, but it's very quiet...
One of the reasons it’s very quiet is that you can only do what the company that provided it to you allows you to do with it. You can’t reinstall a fork of PlayStation OS, for instance. Sony won’t provide you the sources and the changes they made. If it was a GPLv3 OS, they would provide everything you need to build your own PlayStation OS.
>Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice.
That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
It's not a suggestion, it's a fact. BSD is permissive open source software, not copyleft free software.
> [The FreeBSD license] is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
> The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs.
> However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values.
> The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice.
> By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles.
> This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.
It is great that you post and quoted this. In which I suggest you reread the page yourself. It make the case very clear.
There are literally 4 - 5 paragraphs on the whole thing with examples what is considered free software. Directly from RMS himself.
>Another misunderstanding of “open source” is the idea that it means “not using the GNU GPL.” This tends to accompany another misunderstanding that “free software” means “GPL-covered software.” These are both mistaken, since the GNU GPL qualifies as an open source license and most of the open source licenses qualify as free software licenses[1]. There are many free software licenses* aside from the GNU GPL. *
And in [1],
>Modified BSD license (#ModifiedBSD) This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
>This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license.
I actually originally asked on what you were suggesting because the idea that BSD is not Free software died a more than decade ago. That is the whole reason why Stallman wrote the page and even mentioned Rust as an example. Along with issues came up from Tivo etc. I am surprised it is now rising up again.
Copyleft has never been a hard requirement for free software. If anything I feel like it stands against the deeper philosophy of given no restrictions on usage to the end user. I understand that's not the RMS-take, but he's not the only voice in this community.
Agreed, in fact I don't think copyleft software is free software.
Moral opposition to proprietary software is a requirement though. It's what free software is all about. It's a question of values.
> he's not the only voice in this community
I'd say Stallman's opinion on free software is the only one that matters. He created it. He's essentially the only person extreme enough to make serious sacrifices just to live free of proprietary software. The dystopia he warned us about inches closer to reality with every day that passes.
And the fact is if you call Stallman's work "open source", you will offend him. I've seen videos of it.
Because they're not the same.
> Moral opposition to proprietary software is a requirement though. It's what free software is all about.
Neither of those statements is true. Free software is about giving to others, and has never required being opposed to proprietary software.
RMS may have coined free software as a term and legal construct via licensing but he wasn’t the first to give software away for free
FreeBSD has never played a significant role in the Free Software Movement.
Frankly I'm surprised there was any GPL code at all in the FreeBSD base repo in 2026.
Didn't say they did. Just lamenting the movement's lack of leverage.
The whole idea was to build strong copyleft software and leverage all that into copylefting even more software. Obviously, it doesn't work if it's easy enough to just replace the copyleft software, which is exactly what this news is all about.