GPL vs LGPL..... your thoughts
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This has been debated in many places but I would like to get some more perspectives from the coders here. My company develops small mesh radios for military and commercial uses. We get many requests for example programs and libraries that run on PCs (Windows and Linux) that communicate with these radios. We have such a library that is quite feature-laden and requires separate purchase. However, I would like to develop a lightweight version that I can freely give customers to use but even though we would not charge for usage, we would still retain the copyright. I looked into GPL v3 and LGPL v3. It looks like I want LGPL because I do not want to prevent companies from using the open-source version of our library into their proprietary (for sale) products. The reason is that their application may contain sensitive information that they do not want to reveal. I would just like to make sure that only our library is open source and that only bug fixes and features added at that level are shared with the community. My dilemma is that wording for GPL v3 removes any liability from us if the library ill-performs. I did not see that wording in the LGPL. Can I add it? Any thoughts or opinions? I will also be soliciting comments from the company lawyer but I am curious what others in the field are doing.