Is LGPL scaring off potential corporate “clients”? [closed]

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I have an open source Java library (http://jolbox.com) that is currently LGPL licensed.

From what I understand LGPL, anyone can basically just link it in their app and distribute it, commercial or not, without the risk of having to "contaminate" their code. However I sometimes get the perception that companies misunderstand this and will not touch anything with the letters GPL in the license.

Is this justified in your company and if so which license would be ideal?

(I just care about getting an acknowledgement for my work -- not if anyone else gets rich in the process)

Answer 1

The LGPL license v2.1 is very long, has a "political" header and many think leaves rather too many things unclear (try reading it and thinking about how a lawyer could deliberately mis-read it).

Authors use it because they think they know what it means, that changes to the project require giving back, but usage does not. My view is that interpretation is optimistic and open to legal challenge. As such, many businesses avoid LGPL v2.1 licensed code, although it definitely does vary (some legal opinion says its OK, some doesn't).

The strange part is that when you ask many of the authors (like yourself) what they care about, its usually maximum adoption and acknowledgment, and the more "political" aspects of copy-left are less interesting. Thats why the Apache v2 license is a good default choice.

The MIT or BSD-3-clause licenses are also options as they are short and say very little, but for most normal uses the Apache v2 has superceded them.

Answer 2

I think the corporates are slowly but surely warming up to LGPL. That said, you might want to look at some more permissive licenses like the MIT, BSD and Apache ones - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence

Answer 3

I think the answer depends on the version. LGPL v3 is poison to most companies, because it's worded in such a way that they'd have to make any system that uses a component licensed under LGPL v3 to anyone who asked for it.

Whether you agree that even having the most proprietary source code in your possession would do you much good is another matter, but that's their concern.

Answer 4

If your solution is worthy you will get acknowledgement anyway. Look at SQLite3 - it's public domain, yet the most widely deployed database.