LGPL and the OSD

Bryan George bgeorge at mitre.org
Thu Nov 2 18:12:36 UTC 2000


At the risk of starting another longish thread, I have to ask a question
that arose in my mind from yesterday's LGPL discussion:  Is the LGPL
truly OSD-compliant?

The OSD states that a compliant license must not restrict anyone from
making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.  At the same
time, LGPL Section 6 states that anyone distributing a linked executable
must use "a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the
Library."

It seems that, since shared library mechanisms in commercial embedded
systems are quite rare, this provision is a license trap against the
field of commercial embedded systems development, which if so would be a
clear violation of OSD clause 6.

I strongly suspect I'm reading this incorrectly - anyone care to point
out how?

Thanks,

Bryan

-- 
Dr. Bryan George                     Phone: +1 (703) 883-5458
Lead Signal Processing Engineer      FAX:   +1 (703) 883-6708
The MITRE Corporation                Email: bgeorge at mitre.org
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McLean, VA 22102-3481 USA

Disclaimer: I speak for absolutely no one besides myself.




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