samba license change

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Oct 10 16:38:25 UTC 2007


Simo Sorce <ssorce <at> redhat.com> writes:
> Slashdot ? On Slashdot anybody can say anything and the contrary, I
> wonder why people is so shy to talk directly with other developers when
> they need to...

There were also some developer blogs. There may have been some lack of 
communication. But do you expect them to follow every single thread on your 
mailing list? You don't follow every single thread on kde-core-devel, or even 
every single thread related to licensing there, either, do you?

> If Qt3 is obsolete I can't understand why Trolltech can't add an
> exception there, it should be actually much more easier for older
> unsupported software, after all who cares for that? It's going to slowly
> disappear from the scene anyway and GPLv2 vs GPLv2+/exception for v3
> does not make any difference in that case.

Historically, Trolltech has always done license changes only for the new 
versions, I think they want to use that as leverage to force people to use the 
new version, which is annoying in the context of KDE where KDE is generally not 
ready for said new version yet when they do the change.

As for GPLv2+exception: is the affected Samba code GPLv3+ or LGPLv3+? If it's 
LGPLv3+, an exception in Qt might work (but we'd still need Trolltech to grant 
it!), if it's GPLv3+, we need an exception from BOTH sides.

> In any case I was under the impression that F9 was going to use
> KDE4/QT4, have plans changed ?

That's the plan. But this mess will essentially force us to move (leaving us 
with no fallback plan), and that's only if Trolltech updates the Qt 4 license, 
if they don't, we're stuck. Well, we can ship a KDE without SMB support, but is 
that really what you want in the Samba project?

Don't get me wrong, I agree Trolltech's use of GPL v2 only and not doing 
anything about the GPLv3 (at least not fast enough) is bad, but Samba 
essentially knowingly sabotaging what's probably their biggest user isn't a 
solution to that problem either.

        Kevin Kofler




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