I saw in FreeBSD's quarterly report the following:

     __________________________________________________________________

BSD Bintools project

   URL: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDBintools

   Contact: Kai Wang <kaiw27@gmail.com>

   A basic implementation of ar(1) (include ranlib) was finished and
   available in the perforce repository. Currently it provides all the
   main functions an ar(1) should have and it is based on the libarchive
   and libelf library thus is expected to have a better and simpler
   structure than the GPL'ed version. The work left in this part of the
   project is to perform a elaborate test and add additional functions.
     __________________________________________________________________


The webpage says: "This project plans to re-implement part of the GNU 
binutils based on the libelf and libarchive libraries. It will bring 
FreeBSD a BSD Licensed toolchain for processing ELF binary file. First 
part of the project, which is scheduled to complete within this summer, 
mainly concentrate on re-implementing tools including ar(1), ranlib(1), 
objcopy(1), strip(1) and composing corresponding manual pages."