Re: [Netatalk-devel] Another reason to go GPL


Subject: Re: [Netatalk-devel] Another reason to go GPL
From: a sun (a.sun@sun.com)
Date: Wed Mar 28 2001 - 00:49:22 EST


   Here's another reason we should go GPL with netatalk. Samba has a piece
   of code which does quotas on Veritas File Systems which I need to use at
   our site. Same problem as the file locking code though. We can't take
   GPL code and place it in netatalk without releasing netatalk as GPL.

umm, it really isn't the same problem. veritas has an api for querying
quota information. netatalk has a single file that deals with
specifics on quota info. if using the standard quota interface doesn't
work with veritas, writing a bit of code to interface with veritas'
api shouldn't be a hard task. you can even use the gpl code as a
reference for the veritas api, and it won't cause any problems.

the issue with the samba locking code is very different as they don't
provide standard api's that we can call without becoming
GPL-encumbered. that's their decision. of course, we could always
re-implement the samba locking scheme ourselves, but that would be a
lot of duplication of effort to avoid a license change.

in this debate on gpl, i think we need to distinguish between aspects
that a license change would clearly help (integrating samba locking)
from those that probably should be left to re-implementation (quota
details). what i don't want to see is the inclusion of code just
because it happens to have a compatible license.

-a



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