Samba 3.2 will be GPLv3

I hadn’t noticed, but the GPLv3 claims to be final. They even had a news conference to announce that it was shipping, complete with a video feed of Fearless Leader.

Today’s news is saying that Samba — the open source answer to Microsoft’s SMB — will adopt the GPLv3 with Samba 3.2.

This is not really news. Samba already said that seven months ago. And the person making the announcement, Jeremy Allison, quit Novell over its patent deal with Microsoft and thus I suspect has pushed for GPLv3 for its patent retaliation clauses. And Allison was there blessing the GPLv3 when it was announced:

Jeremy Allison, speaking on behalf of the Samba team, states that they see the new license as “a great improvement on the older GPL,” and that it is “a necessary update to deal with the new threats to free software that have emerged since version 2 of the GPL.”

Hmmm, I wonder what threats he has in mind?

Although there’s less here than meets the eye, it’s still a badly-needed win for the new and “improved” GPL. Let’s see how many join the FSF’s jiihad against “Tivoization.” The specific gripes about failure of compulsory sharing with the Tivo seem to be mostly Linux-related, where there’s really only one ballot that matters.

Technorati Tags: GPL, Microsoft, open source licenses