In a note from leading Samba developer Jeremy Allison, The Samba Group announced that it is keeping its promise to move its code base to GPLv3.
It wasnt an automatic move though. Without going into detail, Allison wrote, “After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licenses for all future releases of Samba.” The Samba programmers feel that “[t]he GPLv3 … has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of free software in the 21st century.”
The long-awaited GPLv3 free software license was released on June 29. Many other open-source projects have reacted coolly to the new license. In particular, the developers of the open-source poster child, the Linux operating system, have dismissed moving to the GPLv3
“We are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26; this will now be renumbered, so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0,” Allison said.
“To be clear, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3; all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2,” he added.
