Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
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?
Making their business model work. Trying to ensure investment return.
That would be the case if the code they are using magically turned LGPL once they had invested millions. But that's not possible, since only new code becomes LGPL. Now, if someone is basing his business model on turning LGPL code proprietary by exploiting possible loopholes in the license, I wouldn't suggest investing in his company... I don't think our goal in choosing a license is to make sure every flawed business model can succeed. There are lots of reasonable business models that can be built on a LGPL (or GPL) code base.
The current license is something that is easy to understand and are unlikely to scare companies like Transgaming away, but can you really say the say same about LGPL?
OK, now we are getting somewhere. So your argument is basically that the LGPL might scare some companies away. Yes, I agree that's a possibility. Most likely these companies will have been scared away from Linux already, since many other things they need are also LGPL (most notably the C library). But of course this possibility cannot be excluded.
I think that the risk of this happening is not larger than the risk of having companies hold hostage pieces of Wine, and the damage in the second case is much larger; so I think the LGPL would minimize the potential damage to the project, even if damage cannot be excluded in any situation. Of course only the future can tell us who is right.