On Monday 15 August 2005 07:11, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
Now, I am not a lawyer, but to me this means, so long as the compiled program is not linked to a LGPL library (whether compiled with it or not), it is not a derivative work, but as soon as it is so linked, whether statically or dynamically, it becomes a derivative work. Section 6 of the LGPL then requires the work to be open source.
Did you actually read section 6? It's long, but worth the read, and it does not require the full work to be open source 6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and 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. You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License. Also, you must do one of these things: a) Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above); and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library. (It is understood that the user who changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified definitions.) --- end quote I'm snipping the rest, because this is enough. As you can see, you need to supply the source for the library, along with tools needed for performing the actual linking, but you only need to supply the object code of the main binary. This is the difference between the LGPL and the GPL
In their wisdom (I think), the authors of the LGPL have included paragraph 3 to section 5, which states:
"When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law."
Or, in other words, "what we just said in the previous paragraphs is what we want this thing to say, but we do not have a clue if we are even allowed to say it." Even more to the point, "we really do not have the slightest idea if the previous 2 paragraphs hold any legal water or not."
No, that's not how I read it. You snipped a bit too early. "If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library will still fall under Section 6.)" I read it as "even though it may be a derivative work under the legal definition, we are absolving you from any requirements you would have had under the full GPL"