[OpenAFS-devel] Re: IBM public license code (from OpenAFS) in samba/examples/nss ok?

[Jeremy Allison]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 04:29:39PM +0200, Volker.Lendecke@SerNet.DE wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Attached find a patch to Samba that implements a rather AFS-specific thing: A
> proxy that speaks the AFS ptserver protocol as a server, and redirects the
> queries to a locally running winbind. I'd like to commit that to Samba, so that
> I don't have to patch my customer's special RPM.
> 
> The problem are the 3 files ptint.xg and ptopcodes.h which are rather verbatim
> copies from OpenAFS. ptint.xg is the AFS counterpart of an IDL file,
> ptopcodes.h is just are constants. Probably I would have been able to reproduce
> them from textual documentation, but esp. for the IDL file this is somewhat
> nasty.
> 
> They are licensed under the IBM public license, as the comment states: 
> 
> /*
>  * Copyright 2000, International Business Machines Corporation and others.
>  * All Rights Reserved.
>  *
>  * This software has been released under the terms of the IBM Public
>  * License.  For details, see the LICENSE file in the top-level source
>  * directory or online at http://www.openafs.org/dl/license10.html
>  */
> 
> I don't understand the legal stuff enough to be really sure it is ok to check
> this into a GPL project.
> 
> Would it be possible to add these files with a special comment? Is it possible
> to distribute them at all?
> 
> What do you think? Would it be possible to get an "official" answer from IBM?

No, the IBM CPL is not acceptable for a GPL project I'm afraid. It needs
to be re-licensed. If we accept any CPL licensed files major distributors
will stop shipping Samba (HP for one).

Sorry,

Jeremy.