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Comment by gren | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, with GPL you are allow to use the library in a proprietary project but if you modify it, you must publish the library modification, not the whole project.

Am I wrong?

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That's not correct (at least not according to my understanding). GPL license "attaches" itself to any project that uses it. So by including any GPL licensed library, you must also release the source code of the thing you are including it in. The LGPL allows you to use the library in a project and only commit back changes to the library but not open source the project you use it in. So if that's your intent (to just make sure that library-level changes are contributed back, but not to only restrict usage of the library to fully open-source projects), I would suggest going with LPGL (or, again, MIT, if you want people to be the most comfortable including your library in their projects). More info here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94346/can-i-legally-incor...

Thanks for that, it was always unclear in my mind, now it's clear!

ok so I'll move it to LGPL soon then ;)

Yep, This is what I want for Illuminated.js. I prefer to have benefits of the library modifications. It's a bit more restrictive coming from MIT (I used to use it for some projects) but it's not as restrictive as a "non-commercial only" license, so IMO it's quite ok, it's a minimum of thanks to the library.

Regards

The problem with the LGPL is that it's designed for code that is compiled and binary linked, which makes it harder to reason about for JS code.

Additionally, afaict, it's problematic to use on embedded, closed platforms, such as iOS.

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