[kwlug-disc] Permissive vs copyleft licenses

[Doug Moen]

> The whole comment about how much GPL is in FreeBSD desktop, might be read as GNU/FreeBSD. Seriously.

I feel that there is a lot of disinformation and confusion about BSD within the GPL community.

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).
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.

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.

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.

Please explain why the FreeBSD project should be rebranded as GNU/FreeBSD? What GNU software in FreeBSD would justify that?
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