That’s good news overall.
Reducing GPL-licensed components in the base system is generally seen as a positive step from a BSD perspective, especially when it does not impact core functionality.
Technically, replacing it is not particularly difficult.
dialog is a userland utility built on top of ncurses. Architecturally, it’s just a text UI layer that renders forms, menus, and message boxes and communicates via standard input/output.
If the goal is simply to provide similar functionality, a BSD-licensed reimplementation with a limited feature set would be straightforward.
The harder part would be achieving full drop-in compatibility — meaning identical CLI flags, behavior, and script compatibility. That would require reimplementing the entire command-line surface and matching existing behavior closely.
So this is less a question of technical complexity and more a question of effort versus priority. It’s not a kernel or toolchain component — just a userland utility.
