[Samba] Samba 3.0.37 license confusion

Jeremy Allison jra at samba.org
Thu Aug 21 11:38:53 MDT 2014


On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 08:27:51PM +1200, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-08-19 at 08:55 +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 02:37:05PM +0800, Ronnie Zheng wrote:
> > > Hello Jeremy and samba maintainers,
> > > 
> > > I am using Samba 3.0.37 and I am confused about the license.
> > > On one hand both the COPYING file in the 3.0.37 tarball and your
> > > website indicates that version 3.0.37 is GPLv2.
> > > http://news.samba.org/announcements/samba_gplv3/
> > > 
> > > On the other hand, in the 3.0.37 tarball, there are many files with
> > > GPLv3 headers without any exception. For instance, several file in
> > > source/client directory.
> > > 
> > > So my question is if it is released under GPLv2, why there are so many
> > > GPLv3 license only files ?
> > 
> > With a quick scan I found source/client/mount.cifs.c,
> > source/client/mount.h and source/client/mtab.c. All three
> > comprise the mount.cifs helper program to mount Linux
> > cifs.ko file systems. Yes, that program might be v3, but
> > Samba proper is v2+. I have not found evidence they are
> > linked together as shipped by Samba.
> > 
> > What other files did you find to be v3?
> 
> I had this come up at a previous employer, and in September 2011 I got
> this patch approved by the copyright holders on our private list. 
> 
> I don't see any indication of this making it into the GIT tree or a
> release tarball, probably because 3.0 is no longer supported in any
> fashion, but perhaps it should go on
> https://www.samba.org/samba/patches/
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Andrew Bartlett

+1 from me (Reviewed-by) on adding this patch if we
do a 'license-correction' 3.0.x.

Jeremy.


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