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

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 12:55:43AM +0200, Sune Vuorela wrote:

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

> Qt (and thus kde) is GPLv2 only.

> 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.

Damn, I overlooked this when reviewing the licenses of smbclient-using
packages in Debian on behalf of upstream, because the debian/copyright in
kdebase itself doesn't mention GPLv2 it only mentions GPL. :/  I don't know
whether it would have made a difference to upstream's plans, but I'm still
annoyed with myself at the oversight.

> 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.

> (KDE uses libsmbclient)

The upstream roadmap is already set, and IIRC that includes a fixed 12-month
upstream support cycle for the GPLv2 version of Samba following the release
of Samba 3.2.0.  If push comes to shove, we could probably package /just/
the libsmbclient from Samba 3.0.x, but I wouldn't want us to freeze on 3.0
for the rest of the components for an indefinite period.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/