What is Copyleft?

Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. rod at cyberspaces.org
Fri Feb 23 20:40:37 UTC 2001


Dave, I don't have the LGPL right in front of me, if you could quote the
provision you are referring to, it might help us respond. Even so, which
part of the license do you think is disobeyed, and why?

Rod


> > From: Frank Hecker [SMTP:frank at collab.net]
> >
> > makes a distinction between licenses that are "copyleft" licenses,
> > licenses that are "not a strong copyleft", and "non-copyleft" licenses.
> > Thus the GPL is described as a "copyleft license", but the LGPL is
> > described as "not a strong copyleft license, because it permits linking
> > with non-free modules"; the MPL (which permits both static and dynamic
> >
> [DJW:]
> I had a look over the LGPL and it seems to have some interesting
> restrictions on derivative works that are almost certainly
> violated more often than obeyed, at least for the glibc.
> It seems to require that limited licesnses be given to modify
> the code and to reverse engineer it to aid in modifying it. There
> are also requirements with regard to notifying the library copyright.
>
> As I read it, if you want to completely avoid restrictions, you
> must distribute the proprietory code as unlinked object files
> and let the end user create the final executable.  (This only
> works for the LGPL as it contains exemptions for common uses of
> header files.)
>
> IANAL
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