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Comment by purplesinha | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but this requirement is the reason I stopped using Qt for my own projects. Those terms would seem to mean anything you write using Qt can't be deployed on a closed platform. Tons of people use LGPLd code on iOS and Android (stores like Play and Amazon) though and I think most users and developers are ignorant of the relinking requirement. I didn't want to risk it.

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The Apache Software Foundation does not allow its projects to have mandatory LGPL dependencies for this reason: it would become impossible to bundle the Apache product plus its dependencies into a package that forbids modification, either through technical or licensing restrictions.

This linking restriction is not a part of other product-scoped copyleft licenses like the MPL and the EPL.

Here's an old example of how it can (apparently; presumably according to Google's lawyers) be done for iOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4302517

Google has now killed off Sparrow entirely, but they used to make it available for download so that an end-user could in principle re-link it, to comply with the LGPL.

So if I were to statically link my application but release the object files and let user's re-compile it with another version of the library then that would satisfy the LGPL license? If so I think I might be headed back to Qt.

Seems so: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...

It would appear that once again the FUD is unjustified, and in reality GNU/SFLC licenses well made

Or just dynamically link.

I'm asking for iOS which won't allow it.

> Those terms would seem to mean anything you write using Qt can't be deployed on a closed platform.

This sentence is missing a "closed source". If you license your application under GPL, you will have none of these problems.

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