14 DAY TRIAL // According to an announcement released a few days ago, Samba adopted the latest GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licenses for all their future releases. The third version of the famous GNU General Public License (GPL) was proposed by the Free Software Foundation a while ago as an assurance for the users who modify the free software on their personal and household devices, granting them patent licenses. It also extends the compatibility with the other free software licenses and increases international uniformity.
When the intention of releasing an upgrade to the former GPL was revealed many voiced against it, claiming that the GPLv2 does its job perfectly and that a third version would be just unnecessary. The FSF continued with the project and at the end of this June they finally released it. There were a few though who declared themselves enchanted by this release. Among them there would be the Sunt Microsystems company that made some statements claiming they consider placing their OpenSolaris under the GPLv3, but there is nothing certain yet.
However, there were also others who said the GPLv3 suits better their need and they will start releasing their future products under it and the Samba Team is one of them.
"After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba ... To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, 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. ", wrote a Samba official.
Therefore, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3, respectively all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2. Regarding the code submission, the Samba Team claims that new code contributions will be accepted in exactly the same way as before. Programmers and developers who include Samba libraries in their products should pay attention to the compatibility between the license they intend to release their software and the libraries' license.