There’s a lot of misinformation and hand-wringing about FreeBSD 13 officially removing the GNU Compiler Collection from the base system. Some of this has come down to poorly-worded article headlines, others are born of longstanding philosophical license differences.

The two key points you need to know:

  • GCC in FreeBSD base was more than a decade old. It was the last version before the switch to the GPLv3, which the BSD projects consider problematic and incompatible.

  • GCC will remain in the ports system. Developers who need GCC had already switched to this for years.

I know the Internet loves a good flare-up, but much like this blog, there isn’t anything new or remarkable about it. Wait, ouch.