1:42 PM - Theo vs Richard
Normally, I reserve this blog for MidnightBSD status updates and information about the project. Today, someone gave me this link in IRC to a conversation regarding comments about "free" software in the OpenBSD ports system.
Richard Stallman claims the ports tree in OpenBSD contains non-free software. Ports are just a collection of makefiles and patches. There are a few special ports in FreeBSD and MIdnightBSD which contain BSD licensed code, but that is very rare. In general, the ports system allows you to fetch software and build it yourself. All the BSDs also provide binary packages built from the ports tree, but these comments focused on the ports tree.
I'd also like to point out many linux distros have their own repositories and package distribution systems including gentoo (most iike bsd ports) and sometimes third party repositories for extra packages such as Debian and Fedora users have setup.
It is also important to consider the definition of free each side is using in the conversation. Free software has a different meaning to a BSD user.
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119750352332512&w=2