Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
If somebody (A) only provide drop in files that replaces some functions say the Crypto API in ADVAPI32, they are not any combined work since they are 100% written by A. Sure the application/library as a whole is of course a combined work, but that doesn't matter if you do not distribute it as a whole.
It may or may not matter depending on what your intent is. If you distribute them separately with the intent of getting around the restrictions of the license it's unlikely the court will side with you. Anyway this really doesn't matter at all.
Note that I do not pretend to know how the courts will rule. But I do know that sticking the head in the sand and pretending that (L)GPL doesn't have large potential holes in it is quite naive and potentially dangerous.
Then if the LGPL holes are dangerous, the X11 license should be even more dangerous; after all it's a much larger hole than the LGPL will ever have. I still don't understand where you are trying to go with your argument.
No, of course the LGPL doesn't provide absolute protection; nothing does, and I don't think absolute protection is desirable either. There are some things that the LGPL clearly allows, some that it clearly forbids, and a number of border cases, that frankly are only interesting to people who want to try to get around the license restrictions. And what would be the point of doing that? If the license is not acceptable to someone, they don't have to use the code. Who would risk bad PR and potential lawsuits just to prove that they can find a loophole in the LGPL?
You really make it sound like the LGPL is some kind of unexplored wilderness that we shouldn't venture into. The fact is that a large majority of free software projects use either the GPL or the LGPL, and in practice it works just fine for them, just as I'm confident it would work just fine for us.