Dave: Section 6 of the LGPL is not the same hereditary thing as section 2 of the GPL -- what it says is that your program, which links against the library, does not need to be licensed under the LGPL. But you do have some obligations -- you need to allow people to relink your code with new versions of the library, for example.It sounds like LGPL doesn't force me to open source my project but it does require me to allow the user to relink newer versions of the LGPL'd lib into the application and require me to allow reverse engineering of my application. Calling it viral is the wrong choice of words. It is looking like it's something to be avoided in a commercial app though.
Andy: So Dave... My ASL project: [link|http://jakarta.apache.org/poi|http://jakarta.apache.org/poi]. Lets say we link in a library using LGPL. Lets say then IBM links POI in to WebSphere. Does this mean that THEY have to follow section 6? No biggy if POI does, its whether the NEXT guy linking in POI (We're talking java imports and jars when I say link) has to follow section 6. This if he does...its "viral". I understood you to say this was INDEED true for Java imports/jars.
Dave: [copied from email I sent you, quoted here for posterity. One word removed because it was unclear.] I would say that the answer is "yes" here. But let me explain a few things to qualify this. First, I'm not sure that you understand section 6 of the LGPL. Section 6 says: "...distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications. " Note that this does not require the provision of source code, nor does it require allowing the program or modifications thereof to be distributed. This isn't the same as GPL's section (2)(b), which is the engine of the GPL's hereditary nature. Second, it's clear that a larger work which links to POI also links to the LGPL'd libFoo -- it may not directly call methods from libFoo objects, but the whole work is clearly derived from libFoo (along with POI and, in all probability, many other works). To say otherwise would be to open up a loophole in the licensing.
Regards,
John