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

[Rowland Penny]

On 22/09/15 23:11, John Gardeniers wrote:
> I've been following this thread with a degree of interest and it's 
> fascinating to see the various points of view being thrown about. I 
> personally believe the truth lies somewhere near that line that is 
> clearly dividing people into two opposing camps.

No, the truth is that Sernet can no longer afford to provide the Samba 
packages for free, someone has to pay for them, but the number of people 
downloading them for free, outweighs the people buying support packages.

>
> So, playing Devil's advocate: I find it hard not to see some plan 
> behind the fact that the Samba AD component is not available from the 
> major distros. Sorry, but I can't help feeling this is part of 
> Sernet's plan to start charging what really is an exorbitant price for 
> their packages. 

What?? the problem (if you can call it a problem) is that the rpm 
distros want to use the kerberos they use for everything else (a not 
unusual thing to do) but Samba uses heimdal instead, this is the reason 
that you cannot get AD DC packages for those distros. Debian had a 
similar problem, but they tried to use their distro heimdal kerberos and 
it wasn't the same version that Samba uses and this lead to problems, by 
the time this was sorted out, Jessie was frozen and so you can only get 
4.1.17 for stable Debian releases. Sernet had nothing to do with any of 
this!

> I haven't tried to do so yet (but it's probably the way we will go 
> forward) but if building the packages and achieving production quality 
> results really is as easy as some are claiming, why has that not been 
> done for the major distros?
>

It is easy to build Samba, but it means using the Samba supplied 
versions of things like kerberos etc and it all ends up in 
/usr/local/samba, as for why the distros do not supply uptodate 
packages, see above, there is nothing sinister in it at all, it is just 
either bad luck or a sheer lack of enough hours in the day.

> For those comparing the prices to those of Microsoft, please remember 
> that this is an annual cost with Sernet but a one-off for Microsoft, 
> making the examples I've seen people using quite nonsensical. In other 
> words, for those who are choosing Samba purely for cost reasons you 
> will be financially better off staying with Windows. However, for many 
> that is neither the main nor the only reason to use Samba. Regardless, 
> we each make that decision based on our own criteria and nobody else 
> needs to hear anyone bitch about it.

>
> Can we please drop this topic, which has become a massive waste of 
> bandwidth and serves no real purpose.
>

In this we do agree, this topic should come to an end, it serves no 
purpose at all, except to moan about the fact the packages will no 
longer be freely available.

Rowland

> regards,
> John
>
>