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New Re: Yabut...
John: 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. [...] It is looking like it's something to be avoided in a commercial app though.

If the LGPL library is a separate JAR, it is trival to relink. In fact, I'm not sure how you would prevent it in Java. And the reverse engineering is only to debug compatibility issues with the replacement library, which doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable terms, even for a comercial app.

(aside, perhaps you were speaking in general, not just about Java. If the LGPL library is provided as a DLL/SO library, then relinking is still easy.)

--
-- Jim Weirich jweirich@one.net [link|http://onestepback.org|http://onestepback.org]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)
New Breaks our copyright
And the reverse engineering is only to debug compatibility issues with the replacement library, which doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable terms, even for a comercial app.

I took a look out our copyright and it includes a clause forbiding reverse engineering. My guess is the lawyers aren't going to let us use LGPL libraries.

Regards,
John
New What is commercially unreasonable?
If you are a company, you are in the business of doing (hopefully legal) activity X at a profit.

Anything which gets in the way of your making a profit is therefore not in your interests, and you are going to find it unreasonable to be required to do it.

Now as most of us know well, software companies stand to make a lot more money when customers are locked in - in fact theory says that the maximum profit that companies can extract from this desirable situation is the sum of their customers' switching costs. So anything that increases lock-in is a Good Thing™ from the point of view of a company. (Though not, obviously, from the view of the customers.)

Therefore the provisions in the LGPL, which are intended to make it easier to unlock people by creating a free alternative, is a Bad Thing™. Thus they don't want to do it. Which is why the FSF found it worthwhile to release software under a license which attempts to extract that behaviour modification from would-be users.

In short, if it was something that companies would normally find reasonable to do, then the FSF would have no reason to bother getting companies to do it.

Cheers,
Ben
"good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not"
- [link|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html|Stefano Mazzocchi]
     LGPL Considered Viral in Java - (johnu) - (7)
         Re: LGPL Considered Viral in Java - (admin) - (1)
             Re: LGPL Considered Viral in Java - (johnu)
         Not by the FSF - (JimWeirich) - (4)
             Yabut... - (johnu) - (3)
                 Re: Yabut... - (JimWeirich) - (2)
                     Breaks our copyright - (johnu)
                     What is commercially unreasonable? - (ben_tilly)

Determined absurdity.
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