LGPL license is difficult to use with Go

[antong]

I see that you have chosen to release your library using the LGPL license.

I am not a lawyer and nothing in this text is legal advice, but my understanding is that Go libraries using the LGPL license are quite difficult to use. I don't know your motives when choosing this license, but often the intention is to allow others to use the library in their own projects (open source or not), but to require modifications to the library itself to be released using the same LGPL license. This is however very difficult to satisfy with Go, as Go uses static linking, while the LGPL unfortunately has very specific language mentioning dynamically linking the library and distribution of programs using the library as object code to allow relinking with a modified version of the library. In practice this means that users can only use the library in GPL programs.

If this is the intention, then my opinion is that it would be clearer to use the GPL license for the library.

On the other hand, if your intention is to allow users to use the library also in projects that are not GPL, then as a user I would prefer another open source license like MPL that allows using in closed source or open source MIT licensed projects, but that still requires publishing changes to the library as open source like the LGPL does.

I understand that this is your project and I have no say in which license you use, but just wanted to raise this in case you were not aware of this issue with Go and the LGPL. Thank you so much for your generous contributions to open source!