samba license change

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 9 octobre 2007 08:39, Lubomir Kundrak a écrit :
>
> On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 11:56 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Simo Sorce wrote:

>> Essentially unless the entire dependency chain for Samba is GPLv3
>> compatible, a new samba version under GPLv3 or later would be
>> impossible
>> to pull as incompatible licensing is a liability for the
>> distribution
>> and not necessarily for the individual components.
>
> This also applies to the patches from the samba upstream. Simo: do you
> have an idea wheter it would be possible to convince the samba
> upstream
> to release at least security fixes for samba under GPLv2?

The samba project will continue to do maintenance and security fixes
on the last GPLv2 release however it won't get all the improvements of
the next one. So IMHO it's totally unrealistic to expect to keep using
the GPLv2 samba branch even mid-term. Users will start begging for
GPLv3 samba features soon.

That means all the projects that depend on samba will have to move to
GPLv3 compatibility quickly. There is no status-quo escape - the samba
people know they can not be replaced (past forks didn't get any
traction, and no one really wants to dig in MS bugs in their place)
and they've been deeply involved in EU MS litigation (so they know
GPLv2 is not sufficient). The probability of Samba going back to GPLv2
is actually lower than the probability of the kernel going GPLv3.

Some people have blinded themselves thinking their dislike of the FSF
was shared by everyone and boycotting the GPLv3 process would ensure a
bad license no one would use. Groups that had to taste real-world
litigation like Samba, however, have always make clear they were not
happy with GPLv2 and would move their code to GPLv3 no matter what
others chose.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot