This is the second installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab's series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

Jeremy Allison is a long-time free software advocate and a lead developer of Samba. He has given a talk on why Samba chose the GNU GPL version 3 on several occasions, and we wanted to highlight that talk again as part of our series.

What is Samba?

Samba is a suite of tools that enables interoperability between GNU/Linux or other Unix servers and Windows clients. It provides file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba was released in 1992 by Andrew Tridgell as a free software alternative to proprietary implementations, and 20 years later has grown to be one of the most popular clients available. Previously released under the GNU General Public License version 2, Samba has now upgraded its license to GPLv3.

Why Samba switched to GPLv3

The following talk was given in 2011, and was shared via the Free as in Freedom Oggcast. The slides are included below so that you can follow along with the talk. These materials are available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Download the slides of the talk.

Download the Ogg Vorbis file.

If you're a developer of a GPLv3-covered project, write and tell us about your experience.