[License-discuss] Interfacing two incompatible licenses?

John Whitmore arigead at gmail.com
Thu Mar 15 18:57:53 UTC 2018


I did have a look at the FAQ but nothing pops out as a suitably related question. I may well have missed one.

I have written a library of code for a few of Microchip's PIC micro-controllers licensed under the LGPL. Microchip have libraries of USB code, licensed under Apache 2.0, which I'd like to use in an application. So I'd like my main.c file to be able to call one of my functions and call one of Microchip's functions. (Actually more then one but lets start small.)

I know that the two licenses are incompatible, but in my head I'm not trying to combine the two. And I know that my main.c file might be a bit of a problem in terms of a license which it uses. I should clarify that. Given that it's Apache 2.0 and LGPL I could use a proprietary license for main.c, and there might not be an issue, but could I use an OpenSource license or is that why people would use a dual license?

I'm sure this question has been asked, and answered, a million times but I've been searching for weeks and all you get is incompatible and yes I accept that they are incompatible but I'm not interfacing the two. OK In my head I'm trying to make it work, to save me having to write a USB implementation ;-)

There's very little out there in terms of concrete examples of what "incompatible" actually means in code terms, the term just gets bandied about. So perhaps an LGPL function can't call an apache2.0 function and vice versa but can a third party, main.c, call both?

I've just joined this list and apologise if this is the wrong channel for the question but any advice would be gratefully received.



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