[Pkg-samba-maint] Upcoming possible licensing issues kde vs samba

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 04:25:20PM +0000, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 11:45:49AM -0400, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
> > You'll need to get TrollTech to add libsmbclient to its list of
> > exceptions for their GPLv2 only code.  I spoke with Jeremy Allison
> > (another Samba dev who spends more time on licensing issues than
> > I do) about this specifically a few days ago.
> 
> That's not sufficient, GPL 3 still can't link to it (even if it can
> link to GPL 3).  libsmbclient would need an exception for qt too.

Yes, I've been thinking about this some more. You're
correct, v2-only and v3 are incompatible (see here:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html

for details). There is a large amount of core Samba code
in libsmbclient and we don't want to make that LGPL (not
even LGPLv3) at this time.

Gnome doesn't have this problem as it's already under a
v2-or-later license.

I suggest you try and persuade TrollTech to make Qt available
under a v2-or-later license. This is a problem for KDE that
will only grow worse over time if this isn't addressed.

Jeremy.