On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 09:19 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Andrew Bartlett wrote: > > > > > The problem is, there is no long-term will to maintain such a -compat > > package. How long would such a package last - forever if other packages > > don't move? Who would maintain it? I agree with Andrew and you actually give me a chance to explain why. > I assume whoever is dependent on Samba but can't make the move to a > compatible license would be interesting in maintaining it. I don't think > it is feasible for us to have a new release of Fedora where something as > major as GNOME or KDE does not have any Samba support. Do you? Well there are 2 possible situations: A) The projects that depend on samba are willing to address the licensing problem B) They are not If A we have time, we are talking about F9, plenty of time. If B then they have 2 choices: B.1) Drop functionality B.2) Implement/maintain/whatever their own SMB/CIFS support In both cases I think they should provide the solution. A SONAME bump is just going to break existing application that do not have any licensing problem, it is not going to fix the licensing problem for these projects, a problem they need to solve one way or another anyway. If they choose B.1 a SONAME bump was useless, broke applications, wasted time. If they choose B.2 a SONAME bump was useless, broke applications, wasted time as they are going to provide their own solution anyway in their packages (or through a fork, or whatever). > > The bit that bothers me is that not only was Samba for the longest time > > mentioned in most GPLv3 news articles, we asked if anybody had a reason > > not to change our licence, and nobody gave a compelling reason. > > Things are not working a vacuum. Oh this is exactly right, things do not happen in a vacuum, the license change of Samba was *largely* anticipated and announced some time ago. Plenty of time to act. And remember we are not forcing anybody on a solution, these projects are completely free to choose their own. > You know the major players in Free > dependent on Samba which includes GNOME and KDE. The license > incompatibility that would occur as a result of this move was very plain > to everyone involved. Yes, it was clear, but let me rant a bit: People started warning about the problems of GPLv2 only licensing *years* ago, when the GPLv3 work was not started yet but was expected to start at some point. Now projects that choose GPLv2 only, choose *consciously* the route of incompatibility with an upgrade. now as these projects made that decision, I think it is only fair they move quickly to fix the problem, they have been given a lot of time to think, the 3.0.x version will still be maintained (security fixes and very serious bugs only) for an year after the GPLv3ed 3.2.0 is out. > Such a transition can take several months if we > have to introduce it into the distribution. I don't see any way out of a > maintaining a GPLv2 version of Samba for a while unless everyone > involved moves to GPLv3 or compatible licenses for their own software > quickly if they are dependent on Samba. See above, there is still some time, I am holding 3.2.0 (we are still pre1 anyway) releases for now, they will not hit rawhide until the matter is solved for Fedora. But this is a general issue, I urge the people that work with GNOME and KDE to ask these projects to decide what they are willing to do in the future without further delaying an inevitable decision. I sent notice to fedora-devel in advance exactly to start kicking the whole machine, as I said we have time, but not the whole eternity, and I haven't seen much around the topic since we made our announcement from the interested parties. Nor when we asked for comments *before* changing the license, nor *after* we announced it. I believe it is time to hear something from our friends :) Simo. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
