Samba Adopts GPLv3 For Future Releases

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes with news that the Samba Team has decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licenses for all future releases of Samba. Follow the link for a FAQ addressed to Samba developers and contributors. "To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, we are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26, this will now be renumbered so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0. To be clear, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3, all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2."

Comments

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[goarilla]

samba is a biggy and pretty vital to Novel and their deal since most interoperatiblity between windows machines
and *Nix machines is provided through this service, so iirc Novel will have to fork samba

smbfs?

[man_of_mr_e]

So doesn't this mean that smbfs is now dead? Or stuck at 3.0.x? Since the Linux kernel will not be going GPLv3, from my understanding of what Linus has said.

Re:More like, who re-packages it.

[alexgieg]

So what? Does switching to GPLv3 change anything about [LOTS of vendors re-packaging Samba and selling it as NAS's and such]? There's nothing those vendors do with Samba that will have to change because of the new restrictions under GPLv3. So who cares?

There is one thing: if a NAS manufacturer has put DRM on the device blocking its owner from changing the underlying software, that manufacturer either won't use the GLPv3 Samba, or to be allowed to use it he will have to at least disclose in full the instructions needed for one to change the underlying software (or more probably, remove the DRM "feature" entirely).

So, yes, this is major news for everyone developing/manufacturing/deploying/using/etc. anything Samba-related.

GPL3 not practical for Linux kernel

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The limitation is not because Linus is some asshole, but a practical realisation that GPL3 cannot be retro-fitted to existing kernel code.

Only the owner of the code is allowed to assign the license and people made submissions to Linux under the GPL2-flavored license. Linus has no authority to release all the Linux code under a new license since he only owns a small percentage of the code. There have been thousands of people submitting to Linus under the GPL2-flavored license and it is impractical, if not impossible, to track those submittors down and secure a GPL3 agreement from them.

Sure, Linux could adopt the SMB strategy of committing to make future release of Linux GPL3 (eg, say Linux 3.0). Then all submissions into that new version would have to be GPL3. Practically though, many of the big players in Linux might prefer GPL2 over GPL3 and that could force a fork.

Re:More like, who re-packages it.

[frogstar_robot]

Technically speaking, wouldn't this manufacturer only have to make it possible to run modified Sambas and other modified GPLv3 bits they might of used? Say the rest of the userland was some modified BSD code, that could still stay shut?

In practice, I imagine such DRM would be done by signing an entire firmware image. Future practitioners of such DRM would just have to isolate the bits that really need to be sooper-sekrit if they want to use GPLv3 code.

Re:More like, who re-packages it.

[drix]

G'luck with that, is all I have to say. Having once waded into the Samba codebase trying to ferret out a bug, I can't see them getting very far unless they manage to snipe one of the core developers. Samba is giant and the amount of resources needed to backport every bugfix (to say nothing of feature additions) and be at all subtle about it has got to exceed just accommodating the new license. And don't forget Samba 4 is on the way, so you lose ADS too if you want to fork 3. No, I think they'll either put up or shut up.