My open tickets in bugzilla.fedora.us

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 23:56:45 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:

> > OpenMOIV library, on the contrary, is not your own software. If you built
> > it in a way that made it GPL only, this is not what the authors intended
> > (releasing packages like that would impose more strict free software
> > licence terms on the library users).
> 
> Hang on!
> 
> What about section 3 of the LGPL: "You may opt to apply the terms of the
> ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given
> copy of the Library."
> 
> (The term "Library" is defined as "any such software library or work",
> so if a program is licensed under the LGPL, it is referred to as a
> library).
> 
> The LGPL was explicitly written so that recipients could make
> modifications (or link with GPL code) and release those modifications
> under the GPL.

Completing the quote:

    "To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this
    License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public
    License, version 2, instead of to this License.  (If a newer version
    than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has
    appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.)  Do
    not make any other change in these notices.  Once this change is
    made in a given copy, it is irreversible for that copy, so the
    ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all subsequent copies
    and derivative works made from that copy.

    This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of the
    Library into a program that is not a library."

This belongs to the "upwards compatible" side of the LGPL. When e.g. you
derive work from LGPL'ed code (even if you just copy fragments into your
own project) you are free to apply the GPL, instead of the LGPL, to that
work. This makes it possible to create free software based on LGPL'ed
software and not being forced to apply the same lesser free licence terms
to your derived work. E.g. you could fork libbar (GPL) from libfoo (LGPL).

Problems with LGPL are lurking in many places unless it happens to be
a core library like glibc.