How to work with Samba (licensing).

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:21 PM, Ira Cooper <ira at samba.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 6:09 PM, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 06:05:46PM -0400, Ira Cooper wrote:
>> > Ironically, I was looking to help the non-lawyers not need lawyers ;).
>>
>> Oh - that's *really* hard :-).
>>
>
> If you lay out every option and nook and cranny... Yes, it is bloody hard.
> If you KISS, it may be intelligible for someone.

The FSF tried that. It did not work out well: For example, the GPLv2
did not cover patents, and the Tivo company used patents to lock away
their GPL based software from common use. So the details need to be
explicitly stated to protect vital intellectual property from
proprietization.

That's why GPLv3 now covers patents, because patents were abused
against it. It's also why I want to slap in the head people who say
"ohh, I won't follow a sane license, I'll just invent my own unique
one". Danial J. Bernstein's old licenses for daemontools and djbdns
and qmail come to mind: no one could include binaries made from
modified source, per his policy,so they couldn't fix the funky layout
or even correct comments, so good software was rejected from major
distributions. And so, instead of a funky but smaller daemon
management tool like daemontools from years ago, we now wind up with
sysemd.