samba license change

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Oct 10 18:55:22 UTC 2007


On 10/10/07, Simo Sorce <ssorce at redhat.com> wrote:
> But you don't expect us to do the work for these projects, do you?

I think in the short term inside Fedora I think there is going to be a
need to handle the license change like how it was previously done for
the mysql client library. Someone is going to have to take the gplv2+
libsmbclient  codebase build it with a new name for packages to link
against until the licensing mess is resolved.  I take it that as a
Fedora Contributor you would be unwilling to submit and maintain such
a package?

What I don't want to see happen in the meantime is accidental building
against the libsmbclient by any component that isn't gplv3 compatible
in Fedora space, putting Fedora in violation of the licensing.  Even
scratch builds are a problem.  Unfortunately I don't know of any
mechanism in our build system which we can use to prevent such
inadvertent linking in the Fedora build system and development trees.
Regardless of decision of upstream Samba's licensing change, the
decision to introduce the gplv3 code in place of gplv2+ code into the
Fedora buildsystem puts Fedora into a situation where we could easily
be in violation just by rebuilding existing packages. This is not a
good situation to be in as a distribution project.

Thank god we don't actually have sophisticated features in our
buildsystem like automated bootstrapping or mass rebuilding processes
in rawhide, which would trigger a violation without human
intervention. The introduction of relicensed code,especially library
code into the distribution is a pain in the ass.  I think we're gonna
have to handle this sort of thing in a more controlled way as more
library codebases move forward. Fesco?

If I had my preferences, I would build a whitelist of components
allowed to link against samba/smbclient and start with an empty
whitelist, and going through one component at a time and figuring out
if its safe to let them build against libsmbclient or not.  But I
don't think we have the ability to do that sort of thing currently.

-jef




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