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LGPL is not business friendly at all. It's among the least business friendly licenses there is. Apache 2.0 is slightly more business friendly than BSD.

With some caveats, software licenses from most to least business friendly roughly go:

Apache > BSD > MIT > MPL > LGPL > GPL > AGPL



LGPL is more business friendly than GPL; it's literally "lesser" GPL.

You can use LGPL in commercial, closed-source projects as long as you keep the LGPL code in a separate dynamically linked library, e.g. a DLL, and provide a way for users to swap it out for their own patched DLL if they wish. (Plus some other license terms.)

Also, you can always use LGPL code under the terms of the GPL, so there's no way LGPL is more restrictive than GPL.


Beware that you may need to be careful using LGPL code in a browser: JavaScript is source code not object code, arguing WASM is a DLL wouldn’t help, most JavaScript minifiers perform static linking, and sending LGPL code to the browser could be considered distribution. I always avoided all LGPL licensed libraries when doing commercial front-end work.


You're right, that was a mistake. It's been fixed. LGPL > GPL




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