Short version of a past post: I’m considering to license my startup’s software under the LGPL license, which mostly concerns our “applied science” libraries. Does anybody have perspectives worth sharing on the usage/reception/dependency on LGPL libraries from a personal or company perspective? How often would it still be “blacklisted” like the GPL sometimes is?

Amongst other things the libraries do include tooling for a domain specific language (parser, compiler, language server). The reasoning would be that we would like to lower the barrier to integration of the methods and libraries versus GPL, but don’t want proprietary (language) flavors popping up instead of open-sourced contributions somewhere. It might also somewhat prohibit larger parties from “overtaking” the project into something proprietary entirely.

Side note: our low-level elemental libraries are mostly MIT/Apache because these things aren’t our core business and are mostly filling gaps where standard implementations are missing.

  • Glitterkoe@lemmy.worldOP
    2·
    2 days ago

    Before I forget: many thanks for your response! It’s nice to discuss this.

    That distinction is important indeed. I could always add a notice to the README to underline that for potential users.

    I’m going to make a dependency map of our own libs and license the language tools and their dependencies as LGPL such that they can be relatively freely embedded in other products. The post-processing and analysis libs/applications will then be licensed under the AGPL (dual licensing). We had other libraries under the GPL before, but in the current landscape it seems wise to cover the hosted/embedded variations as well.