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LGPL is fine for 'commercial folks' aswell, as long as they are willing to make changes they've made to the 'LGPL licenced code' available in source form.

If you are not willing to do this then no, LGPL is not right for you.

As an example, Apple uses the LGPL licenced Webkit in their proprietary Safari browser.

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WebKit is BSD licensed; WebCore, which WebKit uses, is under LGPL. Apple seems to actively put as much code as they can in WebKit as they can, so they can avoid open-sourcing their fork, and they have carefully isolated WebCore sufficiently that many of the more interesting changes they make to it (such as those that give them advantages on mobile) can be done by adding binary .o files (as allowed by LGPL) as opposed to new source.

Read "willing to .. .make available" as "spend engineer hours/money".

Wouldn't the checkin to your source code repository already have those patch(es)?

Sure. But what about rewrites? What about code fractions extracted and used in other modules? What about makefiles to integrate the code, or package builder scripts? ALl that is part of our stuff, but taken from their project.

So we expunged all of it, wrote our own or got rid of the feature (found alternate encodings of files we were decoding; used different rendering agents etc).

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