Though we on JavaBlogs had pretty much figured stuff out, Slashdot provoked answers from the FSF. David Turner himself responded and had a nice summary of what Section 6 of the LGPL really means:
1. Make sure your licensing follows the simple requirements in the 1st para of section 6.
2. Provide the LGPL library in a separate jar, and allow that jar to be replaced by newer versions of the library. This is only one of the possible ways to comply, but it’s certainly the easiest.
3. Make available the source code for the LGPL library.
The 1st requirement above is that your license does not deny the customer the ability to reverse engineer for their own use.
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July 18th, 2003 at 12:03 pm
Elsewhere in that thread, David Turner makes a couple points regarding requirement 1. You can obfuscate your code all you like; its only the license that must not deny the ability to reverse engineer. And when someone asks how one is to modify your code without having access to the source, he suggested a hex editor.
I’m feeling a little better about the LGPL. However, this whole brouhaha illustrates one thing that I think is a genuine problem with the LGPL; it’s verbosity. Its more than 10 times longer than some other open source licenses, and much more complex.