Comments on: something you might not know about the lgpl

By: Bill

Bill — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The FSF says that the LGPL is deprecated. Why are you GTK guys still using it? Still think Corporate $upport is more important than Freedom?

By: mike

mike — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Bill: the gkt guys could still choose a dual-licence (or more).

Maybe they’ll switch to the GPL3? :D

By: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m certain that the FSF regard this as a _feature_ of the license. The LGPL was always intended to be a stop-gap licence to encourage adoption, and I don’t think the FSF ever really considered that people wouldn’t “upgrade” to the latest version of the GPL when it was announced.

That said, the LGPL has been around for some time now and this has never gotten in the way despite the existence of weenies like your first troll comment here. Presumably this is because people know how damaging forks are rather than because they haven’t read the licence.

– Chris

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Seems like a bug that got fixed in the upcoming LGPLv3 http://gplv3.fsf.org/lgpl3-dd2-guide/

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

If the company wants to do that, they’d have to ship their whole product as GPL, since if they ship the library with that license they aren’t allowed to link it with proprietary programs.

You can’t compile a library and have multiple licenses apply to the individual lines of code. The compiled code has a license too.

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think there is much room for confusion here. Consider the following:

If they release the source code under the GPL, then the only thing you could build from that source is a GPL’d library. Assuming the GTK authors have given no additional permissions, the GPL would not give the ISV the right to link that library to their proprietary app and distribute the result (they can’t rely on permissions given by the LGPL because they took the option to convert).

If they are relying on the LGPL, then they need to release the full source code to the library (including their changes). Releasing the patch under the GPL does not cut it, since the result of compiling GTK and the patch would not result in an LGPL covered binary.

The thing to remember here is that both the GPL and LGPL are applied to source, and the distribution rights of the binaries are inherited from the source code they were compiled from.