You can work around this limitation by activating language feature, so that you only put language key in the freetext field and actual text is stored in langugage file.

cck_core_fields table has defaultvalue column set as varchar(2048) and this is where your limitation comes from. You could change this to e.g. text but this is core table and since it can create problems on future upgrades so this is NOT RECOMMENDED. 

Hi Klas,

I don't understand why there is characters limit in the so called Free Text Field, the better name for it would have been 2048 Chars Field :-). May be the default storage for this field should be changed in the core, what do you think?

The problem is that I'd like to put in it not only text but some mix of html and CB code.

Thank you.

Limit is the size of database column "defaultvalue" as free text value is saved as default fields value.

But why?

Normally this is enough, bigger fields slow down database and make it bigger, which can amount to a lot when there are a lot of records.