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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

This is why I don't like GPL-like licenses; Only a court ruling will give you a degree of certainty.

Now sure, you could argue that's the case for all OSS. But the GPL family of licenses leave a lot of legal wiggle room. Unlike for example file based licenses such as the MPL or CDDL.

The LGPL is also an interesting one. People tend to think it's less strict then the GPL. However it has a clause which says you need to provide the means for someone to change the LGPL library and reintegrate those changes in your work. How does that even work for a statically linked binary?

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Is not that the case for basically anything? At the end, if there is a conflict, you have to go to court, and then the better lawyer will win.

> The LGPL is also an interesting one. People tend to think it's less strict then the GPL. However it has a clause which says you need to provide the means for someone to change the LGPL library and reintegrate those changes in your work.

Isn't that true only for LGPLv3? This requirement also happen on GPLv3.

At least in some places in Europe, at the time that you have some dispute like this you will need to prepare and disclose provisions for your shareholders and place that in your balance sheet as a potential liability.

I've worked in a company that entered in a dispute with Microsoft regarding licensing of SQL Server, and since the legal dispute was more than USD 2 million our CFO was obligated to place that as a balance sheet loss under legal provisions. Eventually we won the case and the "money" went back to the cash flow.

You also ship a .o file that includes everything _except_ the LGPL-ed library. The user can re-link against a newer .a to get a new linked executable. I'm not sure I've ever actually seen it done though… And that's just C—what does it mean for something like Go or Rust where it's not really easy to get partially linked program? No idea :-).

In practice, you can’t statically link. Some LGPL libraries explicitly include a static linking exception.

You can. At least with C and C++. It is just tedious. You can provide the object files of the closed program or reduce it down to single object file.

> How does that even work for a statically linked binary?

I learned it this way: LGPL is basically GPL unless you dynamically link.

Sure, there are workarounds to make it compatible with static linking, as others have mentioned, but unless you’re willing to jump through those hoops, LGPL restricts you to only dynamic linking.

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