<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div>> The whole comment about how much GPL is in FreeBSD desktop, might
be read as GNU/FreeBSD. Seriously.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I feel that there is a lot of disinformation and confusion about BSD within the GPL community.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The BSD community deserves credit for inventing the idea of a free software copyright licence (in 1978), and for being the first group to distribute a full operating system, kernel and utilities, under a free software licence (in 1991).<br></div><p>The BSD project (at CSRG, U Berkeley) invented the idea of a free software copyright licence in 1978 when they created the BSD licence. As they created and distributed more and more free software under this licence, the idea grew of creating a completely free distribution of a unix like operating system, with both a kernel and utilities. The first stage in realizing this vision was the Net/1 release of June 1989, but a lot of stuff was missing. The Net/2 release of June 1991 was a nearly complete BSD licensed operating system. It was forked to create 386/BSD in 1992, which was forked to create NetBSD and FreeBSD in 1993.<br></p><div>The GNU project seems to have been a reaction to the BSD project. The goal was not simply to create useful new free software like Emacs, it was to create a complete replacement for BSD under a competing free software licence. But the original BSD software that RMS was cloning stills exists, and can be found in BSD distributions.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The FreeBSD base (all the software that is installed by default) only contains a trivial amount of GPL'ed software. The only GNU components are diff3 and libgnuregex, and they will likely disappear in a future release. But there is a package manager that provides access to a wide range of FOSS software, including GPL'ed software. If for some reason you want to create a FreeBSD installation that is dominated by GPL'ed software, you can do so. For example, you don't have to install a BSD-licensed desktop environment like Lumina, which was created by the FreeBSD community. You can install Gnome or KDE instead, which are GPL'ed.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Please explain why the FreeBSD project should be rebranded as GNU/FreeBSD? What GNU software in FreeBSD would justify that?<br></div></body></html>