Quoting David S. (davids@idiom.com):
> > 
> > There's no BSD-licensed browser, afaik.  I assume that's the reason.  We
> > distribute some GPL stuff with the base system, mostly development tools
> > (e.g. gcc, ld).  Others, like grep, are deemed essential for normal use
> > but expendable in production.

> OpenBSD has lately dropped GNU 'grep' for 'freegrep', a BSD-licensed 
> 'grep':
> 	http://www.freshports.org/textproc/freegrep/

And they've modified it to make it close to bug compatible with
GNU grep (or at least make it behave POSIX properly).

Similar efforts have been undertaken for bsd diff (gnu diff is now
gone from OpenBSD) and gzip (libz has all the functionality with a
better license).

Mentioning moving to freegrep (current from openbsd) to FreeBSD
folks got a reply of them sort of quavering about any differences
to GNU grep.

Me?  My view is if there's a free alternative to GNU code, then it
should be adopted and problems will get fixed.