[jcifs] Re: [Samba] Legal questions with jCIFS 0.8.2

Michael B Allen mba2000 at ioplex.com
Wed Oct 13 22:26:18 GMT 2004


Christopher R. Hertel said:
>> Molly Williamson wrote:
>> |
>> | I work for IBM and our developers have used jCIFS 0.8.2
>> | in our product.  We are now going through legal approval
>> | and have some questions.
>> |
>> |    If people submit code changes to your product, do
>> |    you find out if the submitter has the right to
>> |    distribute the code?  If so, do they need to
>> |    sign any kind of statement?  I couldn't find version
>> |    0.8.2 on your web site.  The legal question is
>> |    how long has this version been available.  And,
>> |    has the license changed?
>> |
>> | Thanks much!!  I look forward to hearing from you!!

Hi Molly,

You need to speak with your legal team regarding the LGPL (not to be
confused with the much more stringent GPL). In a nutshell the LGPL says
that if you modify the library and then distribute it you must provide
those changes in source form with proper build scripts to the people you
distributed it to.

So basically, if you did not modify the jcifs library I don't think you
have to do anything (certainly don't have to sign anyting).

Again, IANAL, the IBM legal advisors will know all about the LGPL.

Jcifs 0.8.2 was released on March 15, 2004 (And there have since been
several critical bug fixes including a HotSpot VM memory corruption bug
and security vulnerbility regarding the "GUEST" account. Jcifs 1.x should
be highly backward compatible and the latest release is very stable. I
strongly recommend you upgrade).

JCIFS has been licensed under the LGPL since 0.1.0 (ie basically forever)
and it will never use anyting like the GPL. We are highly commercial
friendly and quite a few other companies have distributed jcifs in one
form or another (e.g. Novell and I think Oracle).

Mike


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