AnyOldName3

I suspect it might not even be anything like that and just be that the BSD maintainers don’t want to rely on any GPL code for anything, even if it’s optional.

I haven’t replied because I don’t know the precise details of why they can’t but Linux could, so was hoping someone else would answer, but it’s been a whole day, so I guess we’re both left not knowing.

Because, as the comment you’re replying to says, if they include any GPL code, the whole combined work has to be licensed as GPL, and the BSD operating systems don’t want to be GPL.

It does seem hypocritical for Gentoo to complain about wasted time building things from source over and over because of another project’s policies when the whole point of Gentoo is building things from source over and over.

Also, assuming any project that doesn’t pin a specific version of a dependency requires the latest possible version seems backwards, as that’s typically how things indicate that they’re independent of any particular version.