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by falcolas 1309 days ago
Oof. LGPL. That "time saver" will infect your entire codebase and open your company to sizable liability.

Even if they're never sued, companies will do internal OSS scans to limit their risks which would catch this. The result would be (at minimum) a talking to for the dev who committed it, and developer time spent doing a clean room re-write.
1 comments
charcircuit 1309 days ago
>will infect your entire codebase

No, it won't. It will only infect the resulting binary.

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ColonelPhantom 1309 days ago
And then I will download a trial of the resulting binary, and send a GPL compliance letter to the company. Unless they took care to use dynamic linking in the LGPL case, they are legally obliged to send me the source code under the license, so I can release it all as FOSS under that license.
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charcircuit 1309 days ago
Yes, they are legally obliged, but they can just tell you to pound sand and you can't do anything because you aren't the copyright holder.
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ColonelPhantom 1308 days ago
Then I contact the copyright holder (or one of the many, in case of e.g. the Linux kernel). They probably care, or else they would not use the GPL. I also believe there are organizations that can help such as the Software Freedom Conservancy.
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