Question on using apache and lgpl license

[Donovan Hawkins]

On Sun, 16 Aug 2009, David Woolley wrote:

> Neo Anderson wrote:
>> 
>> 2. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices
> + stating that You changed the files; and
>
> If the licences are compatible, and the overall product is LGPL, obeying the 
> LGPL should be sufficient.  In this case, including an appropriate copyright 
> notices, as required by the LGPL, would, I suspect, be sufficient, i.e. add 
> yourself to the list of copyright owners for the file.

Section 7 of GPL v3 allows certain limited types of restrictions beyond 
what the GPL contains, one of which (7c) includes "requiring that modified 
versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from 
the original version." This section is what enables GPL to be compatible 
with permissive licenses that contain minor variations in how they handle 
attribution and disclaimers. The terms in the upstream permissive license 
which are not directly handled by GPL become additional terms via section 
7 (otherwise the original license would be violated).

As LGPL v3 is just a set of additional terms added to GPL v3, the same 
applies to it. Effectively the program in question is not being licensed 
under vanilla LGPL v3, it is being licensed under LGPL v3 + additional 
terms introduced by the Apache license. Those terms continue to require 
change notices in all modified files, though the OP is only required to do 
this for the files that were originally under the Apache license.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Donovan Hawkins, PhD                 "The study of physics will always be
Software Engineer                     safer than biology, for while the
hawkins at cephira.com                   hazards of physics drop off as 1/r^2,
http://www.cephira.com                biological ones grow exponentially."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------