Re: [libmicrohttpd] License incompatibility with embedded targets

[Christian Grothoff]

It is my understanding that the LGPL is satisfied if you make all modifications 
you make to the MHD library available to your users under the LGPL.  In this 
context, modifications to the library would for me be anything that provides 
implementations of APIs in the "microhttpd.h" header file.  How you link to 
this code (static/dynamic/whatever) does not really matter.  And for embedded 
devices, it is obviously not necessary to ship the source code on the device 
itself, providing users with a reasonable way to access the code (CDROM, 
webpage, etc.) is sufficient.  And if you made no modifications, linking to GNU 
should be fine as well IMO.

While I'm not a lawyer, I think this is both legally accurate and certainly  I 
as maintainer would not ask anyone to do more. Now, if your legal team still 
has problems with that, they should feel free to contact FSF lawyers or myself 
off-list and most likely sufficient assurances can be agreed upon.

Finally, I would like us to not go into a long discussion into this topic on 
this list; let's not turn this list into debian-legal.

Thanks!

Christian

On Wednesday 23 September 2009 10:28:50 Øyvind Harboe wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Gerry Steele <address@hidden> 
wrote:
> > My understanding of the LGPL is it should be possible to statically
> > link your software against an LGPL lib if you also provide a dynamic
> > version of the same product at the same time or make it just as
> > available. Not sure how practical that would be for you.
> 
> eCos and most other deeply embedded operating systems
> do not have a dynamic loading capability.
> 
> (eCos does have this, but it's very rough around the edges
> and does not support all architectures)
> 

-- 
http://grothoff.org/christian/