samba license change

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 10:55 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 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?

It depends on the amount of work involved, but it is not the top of my
priorities, I could be a co-maintainer though if someone more involved
with the projects needing this package can take up the ball and do it
themselves.

In any case I would rather see upstream take action and solve this
problem for all their users including Fedora.

> 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.

That's why I removed the only package I built in rawhide and I said I
will hold any other 3.2.0 package until the matter is clear.

> 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.

Better we start thinking of it, Samba is not the only project that
switched to the v3. On a side note however I think we shouldn't see this
a special case, any license change in any package may have the same
consequences, we just need to be diligent and warn people, and people
need to be diligent and check if they are affect as we always should do.

Simo.

> -jef
>