[Samba] Sernet 4.3.X package is no longer free :/

[Rowland Penny]

On 22/09/15 11:24, Peter Grotz - Obel und Partner GbR wrote:
> Come on Rowland,
>
> it´s obvious that not that much people build their own packages because they don´t have the necessary experience. But they want to help testing the new AD features that the samba team develops. Using Suse or RedHat AD is not really usable. So people take centos or debian or something similar to use these great work done by the samba team.
> In my opinion the lack of a common test basis will outbrake community and in consequence the whole samba project.
> I understand that sernet must be paid for their work in some kind of way but when you look at their prices: omg!!! A small company with let´s say 2 DCs an 2 fileserver must pay 1380€ per year?!
> Come on Rowland! That way we can change for MS in the same way. That´s maybe cheaper...  :( A lot of people might think that way.
> Wheater this is good for the samba project I don’t know.
>
> No harm meant!
>
> Peter
>
>
>

There is *nothing* stopping anybody building Samba themselves, all the 
instructions are on the wiki. However, if you do build it yourself 
following those instructions, everything will end up in 
'/usr/local/samba'. Now this is not really a problem, it is just 
different to what users normally expect, but it gives a definite base to 
refer to on the wiki.

Sernet has taken a commercial decision, no company can work for nothing, 
they must pay their workers and as it seems their revenue stream was 
drying up (because Samba is getting better and better) they had to do 
something. They chose to go down the paid for support line (I wonder how 
much unpaid support they have done in the past ? )  and I for one cannot 
blame them for doing this, I am sorry that I will not be able to access 
the latest Samba versions, but I will work round this.

Rowland