Re: Porting Lua to Windows Mobile Professional 6.5.3

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On 2 June 2011 14:48, Thomas Harning Jr. <harningt@gmail.com> wrote:
> That is the premise of LGPL, you cannot statically link to it for the
> fact that a user cannot pull in new versions of their own altered
> version of the given LGPL library.

I think this is confused. If you statically link to an LGPLed work,
then certain provisions of the LGPL apply to it, in particular: 'the
program's terms must allow for "modification for the customer's own
use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications."'[1]
This is not an onerous restriction, as in many jurisdictions (e.g. in
the EU) it's already enshrined in law. If you link dynamically, they
do not. In either case, there is nothing to stop a user pulling in
"new versions of their own altered version of a given LGPL library",
subject, of course, to any restrictions the user may themselves wish
to place on their alterations. As for Rob's point about changing
interfaces, as far as I can see from the GPL section 6 (yes, I meant
the GPL, to which the LGPL is just an extension, in version 3)
incompatibly modified versions are excepted; there's an explicit
exemption for incompatibly modified versions when dynamically linked.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License

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