[Fedora-legal-list] Linking an LGPL library statically to an GPL program

Orcan Ogetbil oget.fedora at gmail.com
Tue Nov 17 18:56:31 UTC 2009


On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>
>> Yes but you are missing one thing. The library is LGPLv2. It is not LGPLv2+.
>> Doesn't it make the resultant binary GPLv2, without the + ?
>
> There is nothing in the GPL that requires you to put binaries under GPL.
> In fact, you can't even do this in many cases. You just need to follow the
> conditions in section 3 for the binary.
>

That assumes that the binaries are not considered "derived work", on
which there is no general consensus. There are opinions in both ways.

> If you ever like to convert LGPLv2 code to GPL, you of course cannot convert it
> to GPLv2+ but only to GPLv2.
>

Now this contradicts spot's conclusion. Where is the catch?

Orcan




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