On Sunday 14 August 2005 04:36, Dylan wrote:
I think François meant "attached" in the support/maintenance/upgrade sense - the GPL effectively makes it impossible for an application or OS vendor to "lock you in" to their system. Having the source means you can choose as any time to ask another third party to take on development or maintenance. With closed source you are reliant on the vendor (or their vendors up the line or ....) to fix bugs and develop functionality.
Ah, yes, that's true.
Which way does the LGPL work? Is it that closed source binaries can link against LGPL libraries, or that LGPL binaries can link to GPL libraries?
Well, I've never heard of an LGPL binary. It used to stand for 'Library GPL', and the text of it is relatively specific to libraries. The main purpose of the LGPL is to allow non-GPL applications to use free libraries, such as glibc. When a library is licensed under the LGPL, anything can link to it, whether GPL, BSD or MSEULA (at least as far as the library license is concerned. The binary license may have other restrictions) There are a few places in the LGPL where it says 'library or other work', so it may be possible to use it on binaries too, I don't really know for sure. But if you can, then you would be allowed to link it with both GPL and closed source libraries