“Samba is a project with distributed copyright ownership, which
means we prefer the copyright on parts of Samba to be held by
individuals rather than corporations if possible. There are
historical legal reasons for this, but one of the best ways to
explain it is that it’s much easier to work with individuals who
have ownership than corporate legal departments if we ever need to
make reasonable compromises with people using and working with
Samba.We track the ownership of every part of Samba via git, our
source code control system, so we know the provenance of every
piece of code that is committed to Samba.