Choosing To License A Library Under The GPL or The LGPL
The former name of "GNU Library General Public License" gave some people the impression that the FSF endorsed that libraries use the LGPL and that programs use the GPL. In February 1999, Richard Stallman wrote the essay Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library explaining that the LGPL has not been deprecated, but that one should not necessarily use the LGPL for all libraries:
- Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy... Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it... When a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries... the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Lesser GPL for that library.
Indeed, Stallman and the FSF sometimes advocate licenses even less restrictive than the LGPL as a matter of strategy. A prominent example was Stallman's endorsement of the use of a BSD-style license by the Vorbis project for use in its libraries.
Read more about this topic: GNU Lesser General Public License
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