samba license change

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 20:14 +0200, dragoran wrote:
> On 10/9/07, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Jeff Spaleta (jspaleta at gmail.com) said:
> > > Samba as a project has every right to re-license its codebase as it
> > > sees fit. But at the same time, don't we as a distributor have some
> > > responsibility to make sure we introduce that change in such a way to
> > > minimize potential licensing violations? I think we do.
> >
> > However, changing the license differently from upstream doesn't really
> > help anybody.
> 
> s/license/soname/ correct? ;)
> 
> yes I agree here we should convince upstream to do so..

This means we break binary compatibility with all packages that uses
libsmbclient happily and have no license problems. A simple upgrade from
3.0.x to 3.2.x would be difficult without recompiling packages that
depends on libsmbclient and ultimately I know this will end up with
people requesting a compat- package.

A compat- package in turn would be bad because it will:
a) not motivate people to switch to the new one
b) not benefit from the bug-fixes we will have in the new one
c) Yet another package to maintain

Honestly,
I would rather see packages that depend on libsmbclient to do the hard
work if they don't like or can't get compatible with the new license.

Changing the soname for non-technical reasons seem just a way to conceal
the problem.

Simo.

Simo.