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Last active August 29, 2015 14:01
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Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your library
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lgpl.md

Many who start open source projects, especially those for companies, think that they can get around the obstacles to adoption of the GPL just by using the LGPL. While it removes some of the obstacles, it leaves others:

  • Complexity: The GPL and LGPL are both long and depend on definitions of concepts (such as Application, Library, and Combined Work) which are unclear in practice.
  • Reuse: The LGPL restricts taking a small part of code, modifying it, and publishing it with a library in a different license. This results in people who wish to use a different license having to start from scratch, or make the code boundaries clear, where it often doesn't make sense to do so. I see this happening with rich text editors where the major libraries are under the GPL or LGPL.

Instead of dual-licensing, do what many companies have and make the leap to the MIT or Apache2 licenses. Ghost and Meteor have.

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