I must say I'm a bit dumbfounded. I sent an email to the Free Software
Foundation asking a couple of question about the LGPL license, as its terms
are a bit unclear on a couple of situations. I mentioned that I work for
a company which creates Windows and iPhone apps.

  Apparently that was a mistake. They outright *refuse* to answer my
questions because I'm a non-free software developer unless I pay them
$150 for a 30-minute consultation. (They explicitly state that if I don't
pay for the service, then sorry, no banana, I'll have to be content with
what they already offer in their public website.)

  Of course they have the right to do that. I'm still a bit dumbfounded
by it, though. Apparently their concept of "free" doesn't extend to people
developing "non-free" software.

  These were my questions. Does anyone know the answer to them (or know
some place I could ask the questions without being required to pay 150
dollars to get the answers)?

1) If I understand section 4 of the license (version 3) correctly, for
a closed-source program to comply with the LGPL when it uses a library
distributed under that license, it's enough for the program to use a
dynamically loadable version of the library (such as a .dll file in
Windows or a .so file in Linux), which it distributes with the program
binaries (as this allows a user to create a modified version of the
library and have the program use it, as long as the library stays
interface compatible).

This is fine when distributing eg. a Windows or Linux program. What
happens, however, if the program is for a platform where the user
cannot easily modify any dynamically loadable library which comes with
the program, such as the case with many hand-held devices (such as the
iPhone or the PlayStation Portable)? Or to put it in simpler words:
Can an iPhone or PlayStation Portable program use an LGPL library?

2) Regarding section 3 of the LGPLv3: What happens if the entire LGPL
library code is in the header files and there are no actual source
files from which a dynamically-loadable module could be compiled
(which is quite common with heavily-templated C++ libraries)? Section
3 of the license leads me to conclude that in this particular case the
clause 4d of the license doesn't really apply. Is this correct?

If this conclusion is not correct, then how can the program comply
with the LGPL in such a case?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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