Do we need one of those on our docs?

[Shachar Shemesh]

From the samba developer's guide, http://us1.samba.org/samba/devel/
> *Important:* In order to avoid any potential licensing issues we
> also ask that anyone who has signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty
> Free Agreement
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cifs/protocol/royalty-free_cifs_technical_reference_license_agreement.asp>
> not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced
> specification. We ask, too, that patches submitted to Samba not
> infringe on any known patents. Finally, as with all GPL work, the
> submitter should ensure that submitted patches do not conflict
> with any third-party copyright.

Do we need to put in something like that too?

I'm not a lawyer (but I can probably get one). My understanding is that 
the "protocols" Microsoft policy don't really affect us. What may affect 
us is the wider and wider distribution of the Windows source code 
(Shared Source). We should not be highly affected by trade secrets: 
anyone publishing a trade secret is nullifying the secretness of it, and 
is the one bearing the responsibility for this action. However, 
copyright problems may be a problem for us. If someone takes a 
significant amount of code from MS and submits it, we may have some 
backtracking to do.

Shachar

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 10:10:46AM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> From the samba developer's guide, http://us1.samba.org/samba/devel/
> > *Important:* In order to avoid any potential licensing issues we
> >    also ask that anyone who has signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty
> >    Free Agreement
> >    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cifs/protocol/royalty-free_cifs_technical_reference_license_agreement.asp
> >    not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced
> >    specification. We ask, too, that patches submitted to Samba not
> >    infringe on any known patents. Finally, as with all GPL work, the
> >    submitter should ensure that submitted patches do not conflict
> >    with any third-party copyright.
>
> Do we need to put in something like that too?

Oh, right, I've seen it before, but I didn't think about Wine then.

I vote for including it (in modified form, if necessary).

Better be safe than sorry (you never know what M$ will do two days later).

Andreas Mohr