As I have already pointed out in comments in the linked-to articles, there are many commercial companies shipping GPLv3 Samba, and despite dire warnings from a competitor (who was recently purchased to take the SMB code off the market for any other users) the companies I listed are *still* shipping GPLv3 Samba. In fact there are now more OEM users than when Apple first announced they were removing Samba due to GPLv3.
Here's a good link on a talk I gave on why GPLv3 is a better license for commercial use than GPLv2:
My gut feeling about Apple and GPLv3 is on slide 20:
"GPLv3 prohibits locked down “app store” models, where devices will only install signed binaries from a third party whom they must trust completely"
Which tells you more about where I think Apple are planning to go with later versions of MacOS X.
Jesus Jeremy are you so butthurt over Apple dropping Samba that you have to necro a year old thread just to spread some FUD about Apple locking down OSX? You act as if the most popular desktop Unix in the world told you guys to go pound sand because y'all were acting like colossal freetards. Oh wait, they did.
Here's a clue Jeremy, it's 2013 and Microsoft is almost irrelevant now. That means people still engaged in a holy war against Microsoft are even more irrelevant. No one gives a shit who is providing SMB and AD services except IT guys that STILL largely use win server in the enterprise anyway. So Apple went SMBX. Nobody cares. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. Not OSX users. Not Apple IT guys. Nobody. The largest desktop Unix in the world dropped your code and practically nobody f**king noticed. The few that did just downloaded Samba from MacPorts and shrugged.
Given that you are deeply aligned with the GPL corporate shakedown team no kidding Apple dropped you guys. Guys like Landley represent the real spirit of open source: share the code, not use it to shake down companies for money. Guys like you are proprietary in a different sort of way. GPL as the one true FOSS way.
Your attitude is so 90s and in this case retro isn't cool. Today Apache and BSD/MIT usage is on the rise and GPL usage on the decline and devs like it that way.
GPLv3 is an ideological move divorced from the reality of the GPL. It essentially allows the FSF zealots to retroactively change licencing agreements (although I believe the final version may have toned this down a bit.
GPL has as many bad features but GPL 3 went totally overboard. It has become a form of theft and actually reduces the freedom of the user and the programmer. GPL 2 was barable but as indicated zealots with twisted sense of reality have taken over.
Just because you are delusional doesn't mean the rest of us will accept your version of reality. GPL3 has done far more harm to open source than a any good.
As I have already pointed out in comments in the linked-to articles, there are many commercial companies shipping GPLv3 Samba, and despite dire warnings from a competitor (who was recently purchased to take the SMB code off the market for any other users) the companies I listed are *still* shipping GPLv3 Samba. In fact there are now more OEM users than when Apple first announced they were removing Samba due to GPLv3.
Here's a good link on a talk I gave on why GPLv3 is a better license for commercial use than GPLv2:
I don't think you are really thinking this through. What company wants to contribute to something that can then be used against them in the marketplace? If anything, it is the GPL that is a more appropriate license for "interesting contributors" because it puts EVERY ONE on an equal footing including you, me, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle or some garage startup you've never heard of.
If this was true it would be fantastic, however it is basically bull crap. GPL gives individual developers far to much control over your code and the way you can use it.
The biggest changes to GPLv3 that make it anti-commercial are:
1. Patent Indemnification. If you use GPLv3 you give up the right to sue anyone for any patent which may cover or be substantially similar to anything you've ever GPLv3'ed.
2. DMCA. If you use GPLv3 you are forbidden from doing anything with that code or derivative works which would enforce copyrights.
3. Anti-TiVOization. Any GPLv3 software (or derivative works) must be modifiable and the modified version be usable like the original. No locking out modifications on your hardware.
These, combined with expanded definitions for that consitutes a "derivative work" push the GPLv3 far beyond the original "if you use this code you have to share your modifications" intent of the GPLv2. Almost no corporation will touch GPLv3 with a ten-foot pole, causing a GPLv2 fork or a commercial re-implementation of the few innovations from the GPL world.
The end result has been much less free software work and much more investment in proprietary software. Nice work, FSF.
Or you could say GPL has made other open licenses more acceptable. Your general point though that the FSF screwed up is correct though. Eventually as more and more developers get screwed over by the GPL it will fall be the wayside.
Or you could say GPL has made other open licenses more acceptable. Your general point though that the FSF screwed up is correct though. Eventually as more and more developers get screwed over by the GPL it will fall be the wayside.
GPL hasn't done anything. Linux has made open source licenses more acceptable because Linus isn't a zealot. Hence GPL v2 and a finger to RMS. People like ESR courted corporate support of Open source and eventually got made into a FOSS pariah (his personality didn't help). GPL, FSF and RMS if anything has retarded OSS adoption.
If that stupid USL v BSDi lawsuit never happened we'd have had a vibrant BSD ecosystem instead of Linux and GPL would have been irrelevant a decade ago.
We know now that Apple totally intends to make SMB2 its strategy, so arguing over the relevance of an SMB implementation is a total waste of time. We also know from experience that, for some users (including me), the Apple implementation has been, er, less than ideal. I personally think that the loss of samba was unfortunate. We shall have to see what it all looks like going forward.
Licenses: you go with the one that makes sense. It was Apple's choice to drop samba. GPL3 is perfectly fine for commercial use, unless that use just happens to encroach on peoples' rights in the software. This does not mean Apple could not have used the software if it had wanted to, even as a kernel module. It could. It chose not to. I'm all for open standards, and there the BSD license reigns supreme because it guarantees widespread deployment of correct implementations, but this can only work when the specification exists for the standards (EG RFCs) that can be reasonably expected to describe the protocols; it is still up to implementers to interoperate based on available source code, however, so Samba's choice of GPLv3 makes complete sense if they intended a proprietary protocol to be completely described by its source. And, yes, I completely understand the GPL (2 and 3) and BSD licenses, and how and why they are applicable.
I'm still hopeful that Apple fixes its implementation so that it's less flaky and higher performing. Sadly, as far as I can tell, it never did release the sources. Samba now have working SMB2 support, and have worked around annoying bugs in Apple's implementation to my satisfaction, but if the way to transfer files between two Unix boxes is going to be a fscking Windows protocol, they'd better get this right. No reason they can't, just like ISO9660 and UDF ...
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by [email protected]
As I have already pointed out in comments in the linked-to articles, there are many commercial companies shipping GPLv3 Samba, and despite dire warnings from a competitor (who was recently purchased to take the SMB code off the market for any other users) the companies I listed are *still* shipping GPLv3 Samba. In fact there are now more OEM users than when Apple first announced they were removing Samba due to GPLv3.
Here's a good link on a talk I gave on why GPLv3 is a better license for commercial use than GPLv2:
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/slides/linuxcollab-why-samba-went-gplv3.pdf
My gut feeling about Apple and GPLv3 is on slide 20:
"GPLv3 prohibits locked down “app store” models, where devices will only install signed binaries from a third party whom they must trust completely"
Which tells you more about where I think Apple are planning to go with later versions of MacOS X.
Jesus Jeremy are you so butthurt over Apple dropping Samba that you have to necro a year old thread just to spread some FUD about Apple locking down OSX? You act as if the most popular desktop Unix in the world told you guys to go pound sand because y'all were acting like colossal freetards. Oh wait, they did.
Here's a clue Jeremy, it's 2013 and Microsoft is almost irrelevant now. That means people still engaged in a holy war against Microsoft are even more irrelevant. No one gives a shit who is providing SMB and AD services except IT guys that STILL largely use win server in the enterprise anyway. So Apple went SMBX. Nobody cares. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. Not OSX users. Not Apple IT guys. Nobody. The largest desktop Unix in the world dropped your code and practically nobody f**king noticed. The few that did just downloaded Samba from MacPorts and shrugged.
Given that you are deeply aligned with the GPL corporate shakedown team no kidding Apple dropped you guys. Guys like Landley represent the real spirit of open source: share the code, not use it to shake down companies for money. Guys like you are proprietary in a different sort of way. GPL as the one true FOSS way.
Your attitude is so 90s and in this case retro isn't cool. Today Apache and BSD/MIT usage is on the rise and GPL usage on the decline and devs like it that way.
http://readwrite.com/2013/05/15/open-source-is-old-school-says-the-github-generation#awesm=~o8NetDzdLZyfFG
GPL has as many bad features but GPL 3 went totally overboard. It has become a form of theft and actually reduces the freedom of the user and the programmer. GPL 2 was barable but as indicated zealots with twisted sense of reality have taken over.
If this was true it would be fantastic, however it is basically bull crap. GPL gives individual developers far to much control over your code and the way you can use it.
Or you could say GPL has made other open licenses more acceptable. Your general point though that the FSF screwed up is correct though. Eventually as more and more developers get screwed over by the GPL it will fall be the wayside.
GPL hasn't done anything. Linux has made open source licenses more acceptable because Linus isn't a zealot. Hence GPL v2 and a finger to RMS. People like ESR courted corporate support of Open source and eventually got made into a FOSS pariah (his personality didn't help). GPL, FSF and RMS if anything has retarded OSS adoption.
If that stupid USL v BSDi lawsuit never happened we'd have had a vibrant BSD ecosystem instead of Linux and GPL would have been irrelevant a decade ago.
Licenses: you go with the one that makes sense. It was Apple's choice to drop samba. GPL3 is perfectly fine for commercial use, unless that use just happens to encroach on peoples' rights in the software. This does not mean Apple could not have used the software if it had wanted to, even as a kernel module. It could. It chose not to. I'm all for open standards, and there the BSD license reigns supreme because it guarantees widespread deployment of correct implementations, but this can only work when the specification exists for the standards (EG RFCs) that can be reasonably expected to describe the protocols; it is still up to implementers to interoperate based on available source code, however, so Samba's choice of GPLv3 makes complete sense if they intended a proprietary protocol to be completely described by its source. And, yes, I completely understand the GPL (2 and 3) and BSD licenses, and how and why they are applicable.
I'm still hopeful that Apple fixes its implementation so that it's less flaky and higher performing. Sadly, as far as I can tell, it never did release the sources. Samba now have working SMB2 support, and have worked around annoying bugs in Apple's implementation to my satisfaction, but if the way to transfer files between two Unix boxes is going to be a fscking Windows protocol, they'd better get this right. No reason they can't, just like ISO9660 and UDF ...
Cheers,
Sabahattin