Short version of a past post: I’m considering to license my startup’s software under the LGPL license, which mostly concerns our “applied science” libraries. Does anybody have perspectives worth sharing on the usage/reception/dependency on LGPL libraries from a personal or company perspective? How often would it still be “blacklisted” like the GPL sometimes is?
Amongst other things the libraries do include tooling for a domain specific language (parser, compiler, language server). The reasoning would be that we would like to lower the barrier to integration of the methods and libraries versus GPL, but don’t want proprietary (language) flavors popping up instead of open-sourced contributions somewhere. It might also somewhat prohibit larger parties from “overtaking” the project into something proprietary entirely.
Side note: our low-level elemental libraries are mostly MIT/Apache because these things aren’t our core business and are mostly filling gaps where standard implementations are missing.
Put it this way: when you use GIMP to create a picture, your picture doesn’t have to be GPL. The image you created is your creation, you decide what license, if any, it’ll have. What the GPL demand is that if you make a change to the GIMP code and share that improved version, you have to do so as GPL.
Likewise, people using your language to create their stuff are free to license whatever they create how they please. They do need to share their improvements to your tools as GPL though.
So perhaps the best option for you is to license the runtime for your language (and some basic libraries) as LGPL so people can link to them with their creations. And everything else that isn’t meant to be linked with the user program at runtime can be licensed as GPL.