MacOSX licensing issues (was Re: Samba into kernel on )

The DJ hartman at mac.com
Thu Mar 28 04:53:02 GMT 2002


on 28-03-2002 13:15, Michael Sweet at mike at easysw.com wrote:

> The DJ wrote:
>>>> This is a "special exception" and is not really allowed by the other parts
>>>> of the GPL. You couldn't distribute (use/compile?) samba for Solaris
>>>> without this exception because the libc would be mapped into the memory
>>>> space and added to the program.
>>>> 
>>>> The GPL regards the program + the linked libs as one "work".
>>> 
>> 
>> This last line made me think. Apple is using an adapted version of samba in
>> their MacosX Server. They have released the code, but it appears this code
>> is linked to an internal private framework (libary). Therefore the code is
>> actually useless.
> 
> Except on that platform, which includes the framework as part of the
> standard distribution that everyone gets, so it is covered by the
> exception for such things...

That platform would be the Computer of an Apple employee. As I said, the
framework is an 'internal' private framework and not available to anyone
else outside of Apple. You don't need it either, because it is statically
compiled into samba, as far as I can see.

>> Are they required to GPL these frameworks aswell? If so, then
>> this would be great for the mac platform. Then we can finally get
>> that NetInfo authentication into samba in a nice and transparent way.
> 
> AFAIK, all of the netinfo stuff is part of Darwin, so if that's all
> you are looking for the source is already there...

NetInfo is, but apple uses a little server program called tim, which is
undocumented, to authenticate against the NetInfo database (or whatever you
have specified as your primary authentication method for that matter). This
server is accessed from the framework and handles the encrypted "Windows"
password and somehow compares it with the unix password stored in the
NetInfo database (or maybe NetInfo stores an NT hash version aswell in OSX
Server, I don't know. Seems more logical, I'll look into that).

At least that is what my research and info from previous darwin-samba
developers indicates.

DJ

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Derk-Jan 'The DJ' Hartman
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