No question - that was a major regression apple side.

That said, I think apple DOES ship GPLv2 code don't they? Or am I mistaken there. I thought it was GPLv3 that was toxic at apple?

is there a CIFS GPLv2 or BSD client side implementation? This might not be what is needed to fix the Apple SMB situation.

They don’t ship GPLv3 code at all - and they try there dardnest to get rid of GPLv2 if they can.

The old Samba was GPL2 I think but it got too old.