When you run smbd -V on your Snow Leopard installation, you'll see it's running SAMBA version 3.0.28a-apple. While I'm not sure how much difference the "-apple" makes, version 3.0.28a is old. Very old. In other words, it's riddled with bugs. Apple hasn't updated SAMBA in 3 years, and for Lion, they're dumping it altogether for something homegrown. The reason? SAMBA is now GPLv3.
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Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2008-02-26
They'd only need to give each user a machine signature so that he could use his own modified versions.
However, Apple makes money from not letting users run any software at all without money going into the company's pockets, so they obviously can't distribute GPLv3 software.
All things considered, I think the GPLv3 patent clauses do more harm than good. The only thing they achieve is keeping "free" software from being used at all.
Even "good" companies acquiring patents for self-defense have to avoid it. If Google released a WebM codec under GPLv3 all the protection they get from their related patents against the MPEG mafia is lost as soon as soon as MPEG companies download a copy.
IP laws are like nuclear weapons, there is no way to use them for good, the only winning move is not to play.
Playing the wargame is the basic error of the FSF and their licenses.
Member since:
2009-02-11
I'm pretty sure that this is not about patents (why would Apple have patents on SMB?). The reason is that binaries in /System are signed with Apple's keys, which the haven't made public. As far as I know this is also disallowed by GPLv3. My understanding is that this is the reason they are staying away from GPLv3 altogether.
The usual IANAL applies and I also haven't read GPLv3, but googling turned up this quote from RMS: