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This argument misses the distinction between the FreeBSD "base system" and the whole of the FreeBSD project, which includes more than 20,000 applications with all matter of licenses -- permissive, copyleft, and proprietary. Taken as a whole, FreeBSD certainly does not exclude proprietary or GPL software.

The base system consists of the kernel, toolchain, shell, and standard daemons. For the base system it is true that we prefer permissively licensed components. Today there are a few components that are not permissively licensed, and there is a plan with credible replacements for them.

It would be interesting to compare say Debians repositories (all of them), and to the FreeBSD Ports collection. I do not know how much drivers and practical software packages that would differ between them. PF is clearly a killer-app of bsd, and maybe systemd on the linux side. Would make for a very interesting read if done properly without too much political bias.

However, I don't think it will help the parent post. Doing a base install, and wading through all the contrib packages and build a custom operative system is not the most practical thing to do. There are a reason why Debian has so many derivatives that picks and chose between the 40,000 applications laying around in debian repository. This is (in my view) the primary reason why Ubuntu has more installs than Debian, even if debian has more total available packages.

(As a side note: Thanks to your post I went and looked at ports collection and noticed that freeBSD do include many ported linux drivers through ports collection. The statement that I read earlier about porting was thus wrong, as BSD developers will port linux drivers to freeBSD - just not for the freeBSD base install. They also include a linux emulator which makes a linxu vs bsd comparison a bit more muddy.)

I'll agree with you that choosing individual software packages can be a daunting task for someone who's just looking to set up a single laptop or desktop as an end user.

In the FreeBSD world the PC-BSD project (http://www.pcbsd.org) provides an operating system focused on the end-user experience, with a convenient "out-of-the-box" configuration. They track FreeBSD development closely and in general use exactly the same source - primarily changing configuration and tuning options.

From their website: PC-BSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Rather than having the user build their own environment from the base operating system, PC-BSD aims to make the FreeBSD experience easy and achievable for the average "casual" computer user.

> they won't port a linux driver to BSD if the linux driver is GPL.

It's more a "can't" than a "won't". They can't incorporate GPL code into the BSD kernel without violating the GPL.

LGPL-licensed code might be something they could port as a pluggable driver, though don't quote me on the details there.

FreeBSD's license is GPL-compatible[1]. I believe they just prefer not to use GPL code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_...

When the FSF says a license is GPL-compatible, what they mean is, "You can legally combine software under this license with software under the GPL to produce a new combined product, provided that new product is distributed under the GPL."

Assuming that FreeBSD's maintainers want to keep their code under the BSD license, they'll be wanting something more permissive than the FSF's "heads I win tails you lose" version of compatibility.

Yes; but if they want to release the BSD kernel as a whole under the FreeBSD license, then they already cannot incorporate code that has any other license whatsoever. For example, they wouldn't accept my patch under the hypothetical license "you can do whatever you want with this code except shoot bunnies". If they did, FreeBSD users couldn't use FreeBSD to shoot bunnies.

Am I missing something about the BSD kernel licensing social dynamic?

It's not about patches. FreeBSD drivers generally shouldn't be patches; they should be loadable modules so you can use them without recompiling the kernel.

Now if you changed your hypothetical so that it's not a patch but a separate module that compiles to its own distinct binary, and your hypothetical license were expanded to include a second clause, "Anything that links to binaries built from this code must inherit this license," then we'd be talking about a situation that replicates the issues with making use of GPL code in projects that use more permissive licenses.

It seems perverse to say the least that freebsd was willing to incorporate the (more restrictive) CDDL[?]-licensed ZFS driver into their kernel, but won't include GPL code.

The CDDL is a file-scope weak copyleft license, and is (broadly) less restrictive than the GPL. As bunderbunder pointed out FreeBSD is not able to include GPL code, because the GPL is not compatible with the distribution terms for the kernel.

The CDDL is generally less restrictive in terms than the GPL; its not GPL-compatible, which, given the wide array of software under the GPL and the GPLs more intense restrictions make it hard to use in many places where GPL software is in use, which perhaps makes it seem restrictive in an environment where there is an unavoidable commitment to GPL software in some role which would create a requirement GPL- or GPL-compatible software, but that's a result of the of the fact that the GPL is restrictive, not the CDDL.

(The CDDL is decidedly not permissive, of course, but its a far cry from being more restrictive than the GPL.)

How is the CDDL more restrictive than the GPL ? As far as I can tell, ZFS can be included because the CDDL imposes less restrictions on the final distribution (the non-CDDL parts don't have to abide by the CDDL license, which would be the case with the GPL).

You're comparing apples and oranges though- Ubuntu is a distribution that attempts to be a complete desktop OS, and FreeBSD is a single project that provides the kernel plus the required low-level userland of an OS.

Complaining that FreeBSD has strict licensing requirements is like complaining that the Linux kernel has strict licensing requirements- they don't, they just have project-wide standards for licensing. Ubuntu (or Linux distros in general, or PC-BSD for that matter) is less of a project and more of a collection of components from different sources, so by definition it's not going to attempt to impose its own licensing requirements on those third parties.

Think of it like this: if the Linux kernel project evolved in a different way, such that the project as managed by Linus wasn't just the kernel but also the required low-level userland (libc, /bin/ls, etc.), then you'd end up with something that closely resembles FreeBSD. No one would use this hypothetical "Linux kernel plus low-level userland" project by itself, they would install it and then install whatever else they wanted from other sources on top of it. There would still be all sorts of distros that made it easy to do this. Ubuntu would still exist, except structurally it would more closely resemble the relationship between PC-BSD and FreeBSD.

i think you are switching the cards here.. the elitist license is GPL, not BSD.. theres no license more free than BSD (except MIT maybe?) and the reason they cant use GPL, its because GPL dont allow no GPL licenses with it... so what they should do? change all their more liberal license for GPL?

One of the good reasons to like BSD´s is because of its licence, not the opposite