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Comment by gitoby | Hacker News Reader

Please take the following with a grain of salt. I am not a legal expert, but we have competent US lawyers assessing this for us right now.

The main issue we see with the GPL is that your app has to be effectively licensed under the GPL too, which makes your app's license incompatible with the iOS App Store's terms of service.

This is apparently not the case with the LGPL. Yes, you will have to provide a way for users to relink your application to another version of Boden. As far as I can see (I am not a lawyer), this can happen outside of the iOS App Store.

Our US lawyers are currently investigating this. As soon as we get a reliable assessment from the legal experts, we'll add an LGPL option to Boden.

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I think LGPL is really more reasonable than the GPL as VLC case did.

Also you could follow the JUCE library model they got their free version and the pay version with a very attractive payment model.

I like JUCE but the components for mobile still not native l&f, Boden looks very promise with clean code using c++17.

But please keep a reasonable price for developers that make free apps and easy to pay.

Also if you could get a Rust version that it will change everything :)

Tell me, when your user has downloaded an app and wants to relink it with their custom version of Boden, how do they proceed?

LGPL 2.1 6c - on request, you provide the user with object code they can link against their custom version. Should be enough, if no other terms of the app store get in the way?

(VLC is an example of a well-known program that relicensed to LGPL and now is available in the app store, so clearly it is possible)

And how does the user then get their relinked app onto their phone?

(There are plenty of App Store apps with LGPL code in them. The question is, should they be there? And VLC is not a good example, since presumably, I don't know - but I think all of it is LGPL or in any case, open source. The user can rebuild all of VLC in that example. The situation with Boden is going to be that a an app, probably proprietary, has a Boden library in it.)

Isn't the problem of "how do I get the app onto my phone" the same in both cases?

If the app is open source (or at least the source code is accessible), the user would proceed to the source repo, clone it, open the Xcode project and relink to the framework version of their choice.

Others have pointed out how it could work with closed source apps. It's a bit more complicated, but it certainly is possible.

It would be prudent to advertise this expectation of the app developer hoping to use the LGPL version. (Whereas with for instance the MPL and other licenses, no such need exists.)

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