Some questions about LGPL v.3 (support, warranty…)

Question

I participate in the development of a soft that will be distributed on a commercial basis.

Question: 1. If I take the open-source Library (under LGPL v.3), will there be any obligations to support the functionality after the distribution of my application will occure?:

a. for this library, if I will modify it;

b. Directly dynamically linked to this Component Libraries of my Application;

c. Other components of my Application indirectly related to the library.

Question: 2. Will I be obligated to ensure the operability of the components of my Application if the user of the Application has independently modified the used Library and tries to apply it to my Application?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

The requirements you have under the LGPL license are

• that any changes you make to the Library are done under the LGPL license
• that you make you users aware that your product contains LGPL-licensed code
• that your users can obtain the source code for the LGPL parts. This must be the same source code that you used to create your product
• that your users are given the technical and legal means to replace the LGPL parts with another version. A user that wants to do this is supposed to have themselves or hire someone with sufficient software engineering skills for the task.

The LGPL license does not require you in any way to specifically give support on the LGPL library. There might be other laws that do require you to give support on the product you sell (which would include the LGPL library in that case), but you would still not be required to give support outside of the context of your product and most likely the support requirement would not extend to replacing parts of the software.

You are also not required to guarantee interoperability of your application with custom builds of the LGPL library, but you must not make it unduly difficult to reproduce the library version that you ship. You are also not required to give warranty to users that have replaced the LGPL code.