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FreeBSD Just Removed The Last Of Its GPL-Licensed Code
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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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.
Of course they are. Sony, Netflix and the like are major contributors to the project.
Of the ones listed, Apple and Sony have definitely contributed back to FreeBSD. Apple hired the lead LLVM dev and paid him to keep working on it. Sony has paid for LLVM development in particular, but also development of other parts of FreeBSD. Source on the Sony bit, which also mentions that for example Netflix is an even bigger contributor
There's plenty of benefit in contributing back to permissive projects you use, because you have less maintenance overhead if the diff between your fork and the upstream source is smaller.
WRT was the only reason some of those routers were even usable.
Seriously, it's the only reason I bought one. Plus, my WRT-54gl is still supported 20 years later on DD-WRT, not that it's all that useful at 100mbit. I still use it for testing.
I still keep a WRT54Gv3 around with DD-WRT because of devices that require WEP. (cough cough)
It's really nice having it set up as a subnet with a ton of restrictions. Something it would be incapable of stock.
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?
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.
It allows freebsd to be true to the BSD license, and I agree with the author that it makes licensing easier. BSD will always be free and incredibly permissive, and I don't see this changing anything. But a lot of the strides that linux has made is because people need to release their changes.
BSD on the other hand doesn't require giving back, so you get Apple that was the largest company in the world building off of the work of FreeBSD. I certainly don't see FreeBSD being comparable to macOS like Fedora is to RHEL. It's more like Apple took what they wanted and walked away.
Counterpoint: Apple used (uses?) a lot of GPL code as well, but their “giving back” was so perfunctory that the community didn’t incorporate most of it.
Big companies will always find ways to skirt what is allowed in ways that benefits them alone.
There was an attempt back in the day to do something like that but it never went anywhere.
It's more of a symbolic thing. FreeBSD has removed the vast majority of gpl code over the last decades. I think this specific removal was just a last lingering overlap that was difficult to replace.
Is it bad? It's subjective. The project goals were always to be permissive. There was just historical borrowing from other open source projects.
I think both approaches are valid. GPL has fostered a greater number of maintainers and volunteer participants. That's definitely its shown strength but you can also attribute fragmentation to this. Whereas BSD has created much more focused and targeted distributions. I guess that's indirectly due to the license and more the smaller group of active contributors.
It's really difficult to rival FreeBSD at certain specific usecases. I wouldn't use anything else for a NAS or a router.
It's a very lopsided distro, bad gpu and wifi support. Limited application support. Really not ideal for a desktop, nor is it really meant to be used that way.
Yes, it's bad. Permissive licensing (instead of copyleft) is for cucks.
No no I just like seeing my work get used without any care or contribution back to create systems that absolutely don't care about the rights of the users too /s
Yes that's probably bad
WRT54G were the best shit back then. So much choice with firmware, loved the Tomato firmware and its flexible QoS. Good times.
OpenWRT is still the best shit now.
I bought a linksys wrt simply because they had the open firmware. That router was amazing!
You are very shrilly yourself. Plenty of companies have shown it isn't hard to take GPL without contributed back. There are high odds you are using a chrome based browser to read this - did you know that is a GPL project because once upon a time it was khtml (from the KDE project), but the changes were never contributed back. Many embedded companies have their own fork of linux as well - their changes are all available as the GPL requires, but the changes won't be accepted to the kernel as is and so the fact that they are available is useless.
Meanwhile there are many companies using FreeBSD who choose to contribute their changes back, just like some companies choose to contribute back to various GPL projects they use.
Chromium is what you're ignoring here, and they are contributed back.
And that's fine, if someone ever did want to pick it up, they could.
I didn't say there weren't people/companies contributing to BSD. I am saying that since they aren't required to, BSD isn't getting the level of support it deserves. The companies contributing to GPL projects are required by law to release the source, so they might as well contribute to the project. I can guarantee there would be a lot less progress in linux/gnuland if releasing the source wasn't required.
The problem is that with GPL we can at least cherrypick the features and implement them ourselves, with BSD, everthing get closed and you get fucked
Um, so yay for companies that have stolen open code and not contributed back? What even is your angle here?
In the end every licence is only as strong as your lawyers. And even if they don't get merged into the main tree, their code being available is still a big win for users and devs alike
What do you mean "never contributed back"? All of these projects give their source code back, as the GPL requires.
The source is available but not in a form that will be accepted upstream. Often for good reason, but that doesn't do you any good.
So? It's not like upstream should have to accept everything every fork does.
What is the practical difference between code not accepted and code hidden?
You can look it and go "yeah, it is shit, but I see what it is doing, it is better done like this" and push that upstream. Saves time reverse engineering.
While someone can, in practice that doesn't happen in most cases
Does happen though. Better to have the option and not often use it, than not have the option at all.
The practical difference is that the code is there for whoever wants to use it.
I thought Microsoft pulled or rewrote the tcp/ip stack a while ago?
Even if they did (I think they did) it has to be compatible with when they did. So it undeniable BSD helped TCP/IP rule them all.
Windows have always had a shitty different net stack, if it's based on BSD it's truly amazing how they took a perfect thing and broke it.