On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 16:15 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote: > > In general, I think the LGPL is a pretty tough license to stick to - > > I would be interested to hear your reasons for thinking this. > > > it's a lot easier to fulfil the terms of the GPL. > > Surely the only management difference with the LGPL is that you share > less source. If your changes are minimal you can probably submit them > back to the project maintainer. Most other obligations of the GPL > happen naturally if you don't interfere with the build tools.
Well, I have mixed views on the LGPL for a number of reasons. I think it achieves what it set out to achieve, and does it pretty well, but it's not a licence I would ever want to use. And, if I had to distribute software that was LGPL'd, I would do so under the terms of the GPL (via the conversion route). In terms of the extra 'toughness' compared with the GPL, it mostly comes up if you're a proprietary software developer (eg., the need to maintain strict ABI compatibility with the library) so you might not care, but then there isn't really a good reason for the LGPL without proprietary software (AIUI, the FSF encourages free software authors to use the GPL in all cases now, which they didn't use to). There are other restrictions in the LGPL (such as 'modified libraries must remain libraries' [you can't make applications out of them], and the requirement to document modifications is much stronger) which I don't like, and definitely do affect you if you're a free software author. As a standalone licence [which it isn't, but, you know..], it would be difficult to call it a free software licence I think. And there is also some stuff I don't really understand (requirement 2d. does my head in, frankly), and haven't ever bothered to understand. I don't think it's as good a licence as the GPL, but then the GPL was designed for all software - the LGPL is very much a license for libraries, and I think is pretty good at what it attempts to do. Also, I suspect (though obviously cannot prove) that most people think the LGPL is just the GPL with a linking exception and treat it as such. When you actually read the licence, though, it's very different. However, the number of applications out there licensed under the LGPL (which I think is a nonsense) makes me think I'm right. Cheers, Alex. _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
