It is a complete myth, says Elliotte Rusty Harold (pictured), that Java is somehow incompatible with the LGPL. "It seems that no matter how many times the FSF and others deny this canard, it just keeps coming back. It is a dangerous meme that seems completely immune to the truth."

Writing from Norway, where he was attending a Java conference, Harold heard one of the speakers repeating the myth.  "It seems that no matter how many times the FSF and others deny this canard," he lamented in his blog, "it just keeps coming back."

Harold continued: 

"It's the Java equivalent of, 'Iraq was responsible for 9/11', 'Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility', or a 'A dying child in the hospital wants you to send him postcards.'"

"There is no validity to this claim whatsoever, and I wish people would stop propagating this myth," Harold added. 

"The whole idea is based on the mistaken belief that the LGPL treats static and dynamic linking differently, but it doesn't. A variant sometimes claims that it is inheritance that makes the LGPL incompatible with Java. That is also false. Of course, it is hardly just Java that supports inheritance or dynamic linking. If Java is incompatible with the LGPL, so is C++, Objective C, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Python, Perl, AppleScript, and pretty much every other language invented in the last 15 years."

"There is nothing unique about Java that in any way affects its compatibility with open source licenses, LGPL or others," Harold affirmed.