The codebase of FreeBSD-CURRENT, which forms the basis of the FreeBSD 16 branch, has undergone a change that removes the last remaining components distributed under the GPL license from the base system — the utilities diff3 and dialog. The diff3 program has been replaced with an equivalent from the OpenBSD project, distributed under the BSD license, while a utility called bsddialog has been specifically developed for FreeBSD to replace dialog. The installer was transitioned to bsddialog four years ago, and the last program reliant on GNU dialog, the dpv utility, which was deprecated over two years ago, has now been removed along with GNU dialog. The release of FreeBSD 16, slated for December 2027, will be completely rid of GPL-licensed code.
The main motivation for removing GPL-licensed projects from FreeBSD is the transition of GNU utilities to the GPLv3 license, which has been deemed unacceptable for the core components of FreeBSD. FreeBSD developers have been forced to remain on outdated versions of GNU utilities released before the shift to GPLv3. In 2012, the GNU patch utility was replaced with a version of the patch utility supplied under the BSD license and based on the work of the DragonFly BSD project. In the following years, the gdb debugger was removed from the system (replaced with lldb). The GNU grep utility was substituted with bsdgrep, Clang was utilized instead of the GCC compiler, and the binutils utilities were replaced with equivalents from the LLVM project. The dtc (Device Tree Compiler) utility was replaced, the amd automatic mounting process was removed (with autofs used instead), and the ctm utility was eliminated.
Source: opennet.ru
