Looks like that era is over.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
> 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.
There are literally 4 - 5 paragraphs on the whole thing with examples what is considered free software.
>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. There are many free software licenses* aside from the GNU GPL. [1]*
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.
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.
Just to be clear, you’re not entirely wrong. Linux is not about being simple and comprehensible anymore because that only serves a small subset of users. As the userbase grew, the needs and demands grew with it and so did the solution. But your problem isn’t a sign of “becoming shit” more than finding some hardware not fully supported by *BSD or middling performance optimizations justify some rant about its developers.
Just for the sake of it I whipped up a Devuan VM, SSH worked as expected.
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.
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.
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.
Frankly I'm surprised there was any GPL code at all in the FreeBSD base repo in 2026.
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.