Physical file organisation of any bearing to LGPL?

[Wilson, Andrew]

David Woolley wrote:

> The declaration of the protected interface would need to be in the LGPL
> component, or have an LGPL compatible licence.  Although the first L no
> longer means library, it is still the case that the LGPL component must
> be able to exist on its own and still be usable.

True.  And it is also still the case that a work "based upon the Library"
must itself be LGPL licensed, as opposed to a "work using the Library"
which may have a different license.
So the appropriate test is whether Stuart's extension is a derivative of
the LGPL code in the copyright sense (a work based on the Library) and
not how the extension is packaged or where it sits in the file system.

There is some discussion as to whether or not subclassing in Java creates a
derivative in the copyright sense, which is presumably why FSF uses
GPL+classpath exception rather than LGPL for their Java runtimes.
I think most people believe that it probably does not, but
if this is a matter of real importance to you then you might want to
ask a real lawyer.  IANAL, TINLA.

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center