Editing Portal:FreeBSD,OpenBSD,etc (section)

=== The decision to remove Perl from base ===

In 2002, the FreeBSD project announced that Perl 5 would be removed from the base system for FreeBSD 5.0 and later. The announcement stated that the decision had been made after debate and in consultation with the Perl 5 developer community.<ref>Mark Murray, “Perl5 is leaving the base system for 5.0 and after!,” freebsd-announce, May 15, 2002, https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2002-May/000823.html, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

The announcement gave two main reasons. First, Perl 5 was becoming larger, and FreeBSD did not want to carry the time and space cost of building and maintaining it as part of the base system. Second, upgrading the “base Perl” regularly broke upgrades and cross-builds, creating serious maintenance problems for FreeBSD developers.<ref>Mark Murray, “Perl5 is leaving the base system for 5.0 and after!,” freebsd-announce, May 15, 2002, https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2002-May/000823.html, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

The announcement also emphasized that this was not an anti-Perl decision. It explicitly said: “PERL IS NOT BEING OSTRACISED!” and “FreeBSD DOES NOT HATE PERL!”<ref>Mark Murray, “Perl5 is leaving the base system for 5.0 and after!,” freebsd-announce, May 15, 2002, https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2002-May/000823.html, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

This distinction matters. FreeBSD did not remove Perl because Perl was useless. It removed Perl because the FreeBSD base system needed to be self-contained, easier to cross-build, easier to upgrade, and less dependent on a large third-party language runtime.