[frant-hartm]

> legal department works for you, not the other way around.

Not sure what planet you live on. Unless you are one of the execs, Legal (and other compliance departments like HR) work pretty much against you. They exist to protect the company and the exec team.

[drewdevault]

They exist to serve the bottom line, and if the bottom line is best served by evaluating and approving the LGPL license (a trivial task, as it is broadly understood and the compliance requirements are negligible for most users), then that's what they will do. And in any case, no one is categorically opposed to the LGPL. Unless you think that no one is using Linux in industry, given that it uses a stronger license (GPL), which is patently absurd.

[dani0854]

> And in any case, no one is categorically opposed to the LGPL.

That's not exactly true, take android as an example, which has a policy of "no GPL in user space", if I recall correctly.

I do however believe that due to drivers and other things, GPL is beneficial in Linux kernel, but that rather an exception. And also Linux is GPLv2, which is a big difference to GPLv3 (and so to LGPLv3).

[elzbardico]

Legal may sometimes be stubborn dicks, they can be overly conservative and afraid, but basically they are there to protect you from doing stuff that would create problems for the company and usually lead to you being fired or even being arrested in consequence. And they are working from the context of potentially fighting against a hostile legal challenge from people like them working for other companies, agencies, the law or the government. Yeah, they know that we are talking is just common-sense, but the law machinery not always work according to common-sense, and they know it far better than you.

Be cooperative with them, and they will usually try to help you. And don't try to teach them their work, after all, they don't try to teach you how to architect and code.

[marcinzm]

In my experience, legal is perfectly supportive assuming you're sane, reasonable and not a dick to them. They have expertise and constraints (ie: client contracts, bandwidth, etc.) that you are not aware of but that's different than being your enemy. If your attitude to them is that they're your enemy then they will be your enemy because why would they treat someone who is clearly antagonistic to them as a friend?