FreeBSD on Ivon's Blog

GPL Is Better Than BSD for Software Licensing: Insist on Militant Democracy and Talk More About Free Software Than Open Source Software

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:00:00 +0800

What makes GPL better than BSD licensing is that it is a kind of militant democracy.

Positive Freedom Beats Negative Freedom
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Adapting the concept of militant democracy (Wehrhafte Demokratie), GPL is a secret formula for protecting the free software movement so it can continue for the long term.

Therefore, software development should use GPL to preserve the spirit of freedom and carry through the free spirit of Copyleft, rather than permissive terms such as BSD, MIT, and Apache. If you are going to use this kind of license that is almost no different from releasing copyright into the Public Domain, you might as well just use WTFPL and be done with it!

We should talk more about Free Software rather than Open Source. GPL does not restrict the freedom; instead, it protects the freedom!

Although both are open source operating systems, where BSD systems fall short compared with GNU/Linux systems is that they lack the spirit of the GPL. Without this moral appeal, the power of the whole community is weakened, becoming pure volunteer labor and a system that lets others take whatever they want.

To put it harshly, the BSD License is basically a “Cuck License,” a cuckold clause. The GPL license is: I let you ride my wife, but your husband also has to let me ride him. The BSD license is: you voluntarily let your wife get ridden by others, receive nothing in return, and still think it is fine!

An image describing the consequences of the Cuck License. The rough idea is that the professor who originally developed Minix released it under a BSD license with the attitude of doing good, never expecting Intel to take it and make Intel ME, a massive surveillance software at the CPU low-level.

From Luke Smith’s website

The hacker community alone is not a powerful enough weapon against the capital of large corporations. It also needs the guidance of the free software movement to protect software freedom. Compared with BSD license terms, GPL can guarantee the healthy future development of software, meaning that after software opens its source code, it must provide equal contribution back, preventing the software from being easily monopolized. GPL itself is unfriendly to existing business models, and the name “free software” is also not as business-friendly as the name “open source software.”

This is built on a high-risk gamble: only if the first company is willing to invest in this rule and spiritually identify with the spirit of GPL can it possibly succeed and develop a complete ecosystem. At present, Linux’s great gamble back then seems to have succeeded. Companies really are willing to support Linux development, with RedHat as a typical example.

Although many companies are now trying to technically bypass GPL, stealing or parasitizing the achievements of the Linux Kernel to develop their own closed-source products, the impact brought by GPL is still enormous, ensuring that the center of Linux is forever free and open source.

Linux Has Become Too Mainstream. Switch to BSD

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0800

Linux Has Become Too Mainstream, So I Considered Switching to BSD or Systems That Follow the Unix Philosophy.

Linux vs BSD for desktop, which one?

Lady Suwako told me that Linux has become too “mainstream”, so should I switch to a BSD system to inherit the Unix spirit? For the past week, this thought has kept appearing. After comparing Linux with BSD (or systems that follow the Unix philosophy), I kept wanting to switch over.

While writing this article, I felt that my digging into these rabbit holes had gone a bit too far.

Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.

The Systemd Controversy: Once Again Standing in the Eye of the Storm
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When Systemd first appeared in 2010, it was heavily criticized by the Linux community. It was merely an init system, yet it tried to cover everything. But time has passed, and now it has become the common standard of mainstream Linux distributions, almost an indispensable system management tool.

Systemd has made everything too complicated, and the spirit of traditional Unix philosophy is disappearing. Systemd’s design affects every aspect of Linux, permeating major distributions and influencing developers’ future decisions. We, domesticated by modern technology, can no longer understand the principles by which operating systems work. Switching to a system without Systemd seems necessary.

Recently, in order to cater to age verification bills being promoted by U.S. states, Systemd developers added an OS-level age verification mechanism: userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records#40954 This PR was quickly approved by Lennart Poettering and others, and they refused to revert it. Presumably Systemd 261 will officially include this feature.

This caused people’s grievances against Systemd to erupt again. Although Systemd’s age verification field is not mandatory and merely provides a field for other programs to access, some users with extreme pursuits of freedom and privacy believe this is the beginning of mass surveillance. The system’s low level fundamentally should not store sensitive data about user identity, and some people are extremely disgusted by public authority intervening in the issue of “os-level age verification.” Systemd manages too much, replacing many system services and violating the Unix philosophy. Now, it is aligning with the interests of large companies and governments. People are forced to swallow it, because Systemd is already the common standard of all major Linux distributions, and upstream changes quietly affect everyone downstream. Anyway, whatever function upstream wants to add, Systemd developers have the final decision-making power. What, you are not convinced?

Governments and corporations always love squeezing people’s freedom. When commercial companies develop software, they seem to like rushing to push new technologies and force everyone to swallow them. This is called Agile development or whatever. They only pursue 90% usability, not 100% stability. Anyway, after release, they keep iterating, exhausting users, and thereby achieve their goal of monopolizing the final right of interpretation. Then, in order to respond to commercial competitiveness and cater to so-called trends, they often make technical changes without regard for user experience, and so individual freedom is sacrificed. Users who have come into contact with the free software movement will surely be dissatisfied with this phenomenon.

CRYCHIC (✕) UNIX Systems, It Isn't Over!

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:00:00 +0800

Adapted from the plot of episode 8 of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, telling the controversy after Unix systems became commercialized in the 1980s. This is melodramatic fan creation, with many parts inconsistent with historical facts. Please forgive me.

Unix… is already over.

(Developers trying to keep the Unix spirit going)

Unix… it isn’t over!

CRYCHIC

𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖊𝖗𝖛𝖆𝖙 𝕽𝖊𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖘𝖕𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖚𝖘 𝖄𝖉𝖔𝖑𝖆, 𝕮𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖊𝖗𝖈𝖎𝖚𝖒 𝕳𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖎𝖘 𝕴𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖋𝖎𝖈𝖎𝖙 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖈𝖔𝖗𝖉𝖎𝖆𝖒.

CONSERVAT RETROSPECTUS YDOLA, COMMERCIUM HOMINIS INTERFICIT CONCORDIAM.

Constantly Reviving Yesterday, Copyright Hurts Innocent Coders.

Indulging in the phantasms of the past, real-world commercial copyright killed harmony.

Full Recitation
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FreeBSD: Why did you release the Net/2 source code!?

FreeBSD: AT&T-chan…… Thank you for being willing to come see me today. Please do not be angry at NeXT-chan. I was the one who stubbornly asked her to message you and invite you here. Sorry, no matter what, I wanted to apologize face-to-face about the copyright lawsuit. I really had no intention of performing… releasing the Net/2 tape. Originally, we planned to publish only the parts without patented code, and I did not intend to make everything completely open source either. But the community’s compilation had already begun, and there was truly nothing I could do. Sorry, releasing the code for free must have damaged AT&T-chan’s commercial interests. I think it is only natural that you cannot forgive me. I made our important kernel code public without permission. I am truly sorry.

AT&T: Acting like it was all for the open source community. Under the BSD License, releasing code is your freedom. Do whatever you like. (See you in court later.)

FreeBSD: But Net/2 is important to the CSRG lab……

AT&T: Still clinging to the academic traditions of the 1970s even now. It is painful to watch. It is about time you forgot the days of Bell Labs, isn’t it?

FreeBSD: Why? Why say something like forget? We were clearly so close before. Ken and Dennis happily wrote C every day. Everyone was together, but now we are split into System V and BSD, each going our separate ways. Isn’t that too strange? Wasn’t AT&T-chan the one who said, “Unix belongs to the global hacker community of shared destiny”?

AT&T: Destiny……? Then what is that “penguin” (GNU/Linux)?

FreeBSD: No!

AT&T: What part is no? Your words and actions contradict each other. The unified standard of Unix has already fallen apart. It is absolutely impossible to revive.

FreeBSD: Why? Please, I want “Unified Unix” to start again. I want to go back to the happy time we had at Bell Labs, without so many branches and copyright disputes. GNU/Linux-chan and Minix-chan hope for that too, and I also planned to find NeXT-chan and AT&T-chan and bring you back.

AT&T: Is that how it is?

NeXT: I…… (As long as there is BSD code for Jobs to take and sell for money, that is enough……)

(FreeBSD turns her head to look at NeXT, shocked)