[Pkg-samba-maint] Upcoming possible licensing issues kde vs samba

[Gerald (Jerry) Carter]

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Sune,

> Rumors out in the wild says that the upcoming samba release is 
> under some GPLv3 (or maybe LGPLv3).

No rumors.  The official announcement was posted to
http://news.samba.org/announcements/samba_gplv3/

> Qt (and thus kde) is GPLv2 only.

You'll need to get TrollTech to add libsmbclient to its list of
exceptions for their GPLv2 only code.  I spoke with Jeremy Allison
(another Samba dev who spends more time on licensing issues than
I do) about this specifically a few days ago.

> It seems to be that GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv3 and LGPLv3, 
> so if samba  gets upgraded to a GPLv3  version, we are going
> to have problems with KDE.
> 
> I don't know the proper solution to this - and a Qt + kde relicensing to GPLv2 
> or later isn't happening anytime soon. At least not within the next 4-6 
> months - maybe never.
> 
> I hope that you nice samba people with take this into 
> account when doing newer  upstream samba releases.

We (Samba) did take it into account when moving to the GPLv2.
The solution is for TrollTech to add libsmbclient as an exception.
Or you can continue to package the libsmbclient library
from the Samba 3.0 releases which will continue to be GPLv2
but is being placed into struct maintenance mode as of the initial
Samba 3.2.0 release.




cheers, jerry
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