The polarizabilities of the ground state of fluorine are determined by the box-based B-spline configuration-interaction method. The ground-state static and tensor polarizabilities are calculated as alpha(d) = 3.49a(0)(3) and alpha(2) = 0.303a(0)(3), respectively. The resulting excitation matrix elements are employed to compute the interatomic dispersion interactions for the HF and F(2) molecules.