An interview with Jeremy Allison

LinuxWorld Editor Don Marti has some questions, and Samba maintainer Jeremy Allison offers some answers.

You have the distinct honor of being one of the first major projects to adopt the GNU General Public License, Version 3. When did you do that?

Well, we had this discussion about it inside the team, after the license was released. And we were fans of it in the first place. We were on the committees that helped develop it. And so you know there was various discussion about it internally. But, essentially, we liked it enough to decide that this was, this was a good thing to do for the project and for our users.

What specific changes between the old Version 2 license and the Version 3 license did the Samba team find appealing?

We like that we can now use code under the Apache license. So we now have compatibility with that, which is very good. And I just think it tightens up the license in a few areas. So, it’s basically there to use internationally. Most of the comments about GPLv3 have been about the DRM issues. And to be honest, no one has ever really used Samba in that kind of way. So, I don’t think this really concerned us very much. The other thing that I think we’re happy about is the clarification on the patent protection.

In GPL Version 2 you could not distribute GPL software and then put a patent license on top of it. But in GPLv3 the patent-license language seems to be a little bit broader.

The old section seven in the GPLv2 essentially said that you couldn’t cut separate patent cross-licensing deals. And that language is much clearer in section 11 in GPLv3. And so, so we’re pretty happy about that. There was some movement toward what the GPL calls discriminatory patent licenses. And the GPLv3 clarifies the intent that, that those kind agreements are not allowed.

So you can’t buy out of patent lawsuits for one customer?

Yes, basically. And that’s very much in the spread of what we intend with code and what we would like is that essentially everybody’s together. Everyone who uses it has the same rights and the same responsibilities.

As far as the effect of the license change on users goes, is there any kind of impact that I might see switching from a V2 to a V3 licensed Samba on a company server?

No. I can’t see anything that would cause any problems whatsoever. Most customers just using Samba, to be honest, don’t know offhand what license we're under, and they just want it to work. I don’t think that will be any problem at all. The people who need to look at the license are people who are shipping Samba as part of a product, OEM, and essentially redistributing Samba so that’s Linux distributors, people are putting Samba in NAS and other appliances, and as as matter of good corporate policy, their lawyers should take a look at the new license. But, to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s going to cause anyone any trouble, at least most people distributing Samba right now are within the GPLv3 anyway, we think. Obviously, you can’t exactly say that you know what everybody’s doing.