samba license change

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Simo Sorce <ssorce at redhat.com> said:
> On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 13:21 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > But Nicolas has stated my murkier concern. If we just drop re-licensed
> > libsmbclient into place with no enforced technical break like a soname
> > change or a library renaming, are we acting negligently with regard to
> > protecting our own users who consume pieces of rawhide to suppliment
> > F7 or soon to be F8? If the re-licensed code can just drop into place,
> > are we encouraging users to violate the license at runtime by making
> > it too easy to use the re-licensing binary in situations where its
> > inappropriate?
> 
> Short answer: no

So what if KDE used a private copy of libsmclient.so.0 (from 3.0 so
GPLv2) during build but didn't ship it?  As long as the newer version is
ABI compatible (even if the license isn't), is there a violation?  I'm
sure some would say it is a violation of the spirit, but is there a
technical violation?

If so, where is the violation?  Where does it physically occur?

I haven't read GPLv3 closely, but "linking" doesn't appear anywhere in
GPLv2 except in a single note in the appendix (not in the license terms
itself).  Everything else in GPLv2 talks about derivative works.
Arguably, KDE's use of libsmbclient is a derivative work of a GPLv2
product.  As long as the interface to that product doesn't change (so
KDE's use of the product doesn't change), KDE could claim to be a
derivative work of the GPLv2 product.  Samba is NOT changing the ABI, so
any derivative works (that are derivative by action of using the
libsmbclient.so.0 interface) can still claim to be derivatives of only
the GPLv2 library.

I'm really curious about this (not just trying to still the flames): if
a GPLv2-only program is linked against a GPLv2 (or 2+) library and the
library switches to GPLv3 (or 3+), who is violating the license?  Use
(e.g. an end-user actually loading the KDE binary that dynamically links
against libsmbclient.so.0) is not covered by the GPLv2, so the end-user
is not violating it (because they aren't distributing).  A distributor
could be building against a GPLv2 version of the library but only
distributing the GPLv3 version; is that a violation (why)?

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.