LGPL licence preventing use in commercial app

[James Hutton]

Hello

I work for a company which makes commercial, closed-source software. I had hoped to use wkhtmltopdf in one of our web-based products, in order to provide a "download as PDF" function for one of the reports generated by our product. Unfortunately my company's legal department will not permit this. The reason they won't permit it is that the LGPL licence requires us to permit "reverse-engineering" of our software for the purposes of using it with modified version of wkhtmltopdf. The relevant phrase is here:

"You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications"

I can understand why our legal team would not permit usage under these terms. Perhaps that is your intention, in which case please ignore this mail. I noticed however in another post that you do encourage usage of wkhtmltopdf in commercial software, so I thought you might find this feedback interesting. If it is indeed your intention to permit usage with commercial, closed-source software, you might want to consider distributing under the terms of another licence such as the MIT licence.

Regards

James

[Jakob Truelsen]

I will not relicense wkhtmltopdf, if LGPL is not good for you, then use some something else. You cannot use wkhtmltopdf without qt, which is LGPL anyhow.

/Jakob

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[James Hutton]

Thank you Jakob. 

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[Yozons eSignForms]

First, did you actually modify wkhtmltopdf?  Most just use the version that's released, but perhaps your changes are generally useful and you can contribute them back to the project so you don't need a modified version anymore.

Second, do you directly combine wkhtmltopdf to your code, or do you just "run it" from within?  That is, many just execute wkhtmltopdf (like a command line tool) from their application and thus dot directly call any wkhtmltopdf code. 

I believe if you deliver the source code of your changes to wkhtmltopdf with a mechanism for users to modify it in your combine work you are okay (again, users need to be able to modify/see the your application code that makes use of the modified wkhtmltopdf so they too could make use of whatever benefit you created with the wkhtmltopdf change -- after all, they wrote it so that others could benefit, not so it could be stolen).  The reverse engineering is only permitted on your code as it relates to the modifications in your code as well as to wkhtmltopdf itself -- you do not need to permit them to reverse engineer the rest of your application.

[James Hutton]

Thank you for your advice. We have not modified wkhtmlpdf and we had intended to use it as a command line tool, as you have described. But our legal team is of the understanding that if one of our customers were to modify wkhtmlpdf themselves, and wished to use our product with their modified version, then we would have to permit reverse-engineering of our source code. That is why they have refused to permit its use. I will nevertheless forward your advice to our legal team. 

Many thanks

James 

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[Yozons eSignForms]

On Thursday, November 6, 2014 10:58:28 AM UTC-8, James Hutton wrote:

Thank you for your advice. We have not modified wkhtmlpdf and we had intended to use it as a command line tool, as you have described. But our legal team is of the understanding that if one of our customers were to modify wkhtmlpdf themselves, and wished to use our product with their modified version, then we would have to permit reverse-engineering of our source code. That is why they have refused to permit its use. I will nevertheless forward your advice to our legal team. 

Well, I am not a lawyer, but I've never heard of that concern before.  LGPL code is free to use without any concerns if you do not modify it.  And since you are calling it from a command line, you are not linked to it in any way and so it has no effect on your code.

If your customers modify things, then THEY could have issues if they also redistributed it with your code, but I doubt they can redistribute your code if it's not open source and so I don't see how they can do something to wkhtmltopdf that would then compel anything upon you.  That makes no sense.  Plus, they cannot change your code to make use of such a modified version, so your code should again not be coupled to wkhmltopdf code directly and therefore should not have any influence.

All of Linux is under the GPL or LGPL (for the most part), and clearly all apps that run on it aren't forced to reveal their code or allow reverse engineering.  The point of the LGPL is that if you modify the code, you should share it, and if you modified in a way that requires changes to the API of the LGPL code, then the code you use to control it needs to be revealed so others can understand and make use of it too. 

[James Hutton]

Thanks again, that’s very helpful.