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I just noticed an ASF contributor mentioning this on issue tracker of a library that ASF disallows downstream LGPL dependencies. I traced down ASF's policy to this page: https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html . It mentions LGPL under Category X: What can we NOT include in an ASF Project? > Places restrictions on larger works:

If my understanding of LGPL is correct, then you can use LGPL dependency as a library in a project that has any other license (even a proprietary license), and you incur no additional obligations unless you're making modifications to the library itself. This is understanding is also echoed here on wikipedia. Is my understanding correct?

If so, I don't understand why someone would not want to include a LGPL library. I ask this from the point of view of say someone who's developing libraries to release under LGPL.

Moreover it seems that ASF allows several "weak copyleft" licenses https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#weak-copyleft-licenses, which may help in answering my question by narrowing it down to "what do the allowed set of licenses have that LGPL doesn't have?", but I haven't been able to answer that myself either.

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    Quoting from the very Wikipedia page you link to: "if it is a "work that uses the library", then it must be possible for the software to be linked with a newer version of the LGPL-covered program". That is precisely what the Apache folks want to avoid under "places restrictions on larger works".
    – Philip Kendall
    Oct 26, 2021 at 6:55
  • Ah that's subtle but I didn't quite realize that that'd be a problem. Reading through gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html#section4 , it seems that one additional restriction is allowing user of the software to be able to swap out the included version of the library for a library of their choice, is that also right?
    – Peeyush Kushwaha
    Oct 26, 2021 at 12:36
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    Btw if you post your comment as an answer, I could accept it, since it has answered the question I had
    – Peeyush Kushwaha
    Oct 26, 2021 at 12:37

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