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by trasz 1640 days ago
It’s not - Linux does have problems with licenses which are incompatible with GPL, such as MPL/CDDL. BSD doesn’t, because you can’t have license incompatibility without throwing GPL in the mix - it’s the only Open Source license that can be incompatible with others.

FreeBSD does avoid pulling restrictively licensed (closed source or GPL) code into the base system itself, but a Docker port would be third party (ports/packages), not the base system.
1 comments
shatteredgate 1640 days ago
Not really, with Linux it's the same as it would be in BSD if they wanted to avoid conflicts with GPL. You put that code in an optional module and have the user compile it. I am unsure as to why BSD people seem to think that using BSD means you can avoid problems with the GPL, if you use any GPL code for any reason (and there's a lot of it) then you have to pay attention to these things. If you insist on only running BSD and CDDL code then you can avoid it, but that's going back to putting politics over software again, the kind of thing that you were saying you were trying to avoid.
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trasz 1640 days ago
Nope - FreeBSD is almost free of GPL, and will probably become entirely GPL-free in 2022: https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase.

Also, it’s not politics - it’s mostly just that the old GNU cruft is being replaced, and newer, better solutions prefer more liberal licensing, see GCC vs LLVM.

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