[linux-cifs-client] Re: review 1, was Re: projected date for mount.cifs to support DFS junction points

[Steve French]

On Jan 13, 2008 1:40 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch at infradead.org> wrote:
> Unfortunately I couldn't find an mbox archive of the cifs client list
> anywhere, so I'll send you the review in reply to this mail, with
> one reply per patch.
>

> + *   This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> + *   it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
> + *   by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
> + *   (at your option) any later version.
> + *
> + *   This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
> + *   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> + *   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See
> + *   the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
> + *
> + *   You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
> + *   along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
> + *   Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
>
> I strikes me as odd that this is LGPL, but I noticed other files in
> fs/cifs/ have this aswell.  We don't ship a copy of the LGPL with the
> kernel which is at least against this comment if not even against the
> license.  And it'll revert to GPLv2 as part of the kernel anyway,
> so it would be much easier if you just declared the code GPLv2.

The module info claims it is GPL, and of course mixed LGPL/GPL acts as
GPL within the kernel, even though most of the source files are LGPL
(and have been since the beginning).  The reason that most of the
files in the cifs module were created as LGPL is because there were
user space tools which wanted to use those files and it was easier
than trying to dual license the source files.   For example, Darren
Sawyer and Don Capps and some guys involved with SPEC have a cifs
benchmark library which plugs into a benchmark utility - and their
library uses the cifs LGPL files (with minor portability changes
apparently).


-- 
Thanks,

Steve