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Comment by X86BSD | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD took great pains to rewrite and replace all of the GNU utilities with BSD licensed ones. So the tools are different.

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I wouldn't say they rewrote the GNU utilities. BSD's lineage goes back farther than GNU's, they were at least at BSD4.1 before Stallman started GNU. There was an established userland. I imagine there's some GNU utility that was sort of "clean roomed" into *BSD, but that would be the exception, not the rule.

I would, GNU tar and others were rewritten from scratch over the last decade or so. The GNU utilities are no longer in the base system.

What percentage of the userland would you say was using a GNU implementation 10 years ago?

Before the rewrite all the GNU utilities were in the base OS. How large a percentage that was to the rest of the base I couldn't say off the top of my head. But all the GNU utilities were in there as well as the compiler suite which has also been removed and replaced with Clang/LLVM.

according to FreeBSD's own site, their GPLinBase tracker, you're incorrect. Only a handful of GNU or GPL stuff was ever in base, and your example of 'tar' isn't one of them.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase

Then it's missing in that site. BSDtar was the replacement.

I remember having to use different flags for bzip2 (j vs y) in tar on FreeBSD vs Linux about 15 years ago so I was sure they were different, but I have an image of a FreeBSD 4.10 box from June 2004 and /usr/bin/tar is indeed GNU tar.

It's not missing from the site. FreeBSD never used GNU tar. FreeBSD used a very small number of GNU utilities. tar, coreutils like ls, cat, etc. where never used. It was mostly things around the GNU toolchain, which ARE mentioned in the GPLinBASE wiki on the freebsd site.

FreeBSD's tar(1) man page says it used GNU tar from FreeBSD 1.0 until 5.4 when they replaced it with their own version.

A bit of history:

* tar exists 1979 so neither GNU nor FreeBSD had the first implementation. * pdtar, from 1987 was public domain code and actually the GNU people based of this public domain code and put their implementation under the GPL * The current FreeBSD tar implementation is from 2005

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