IANAL, but I believe you're incorrect about shipping the libraries in particular ways. My understanding of the LGPL is you don't have to ship the libraries with your application, you just need to provide the relevant copyright notices - usually in your Help/About.
I worked with the legal department at my company to get a list of approved open source licenses for components included in our applications. The GPL was immediately ruled out. Because of the GPL they spent several weeks scrutinizing the LGPL. They approved it.
Obviously your mileage has varied with your lawyers. And if we want to keep our jobs we can't cross the lawyers, even if we believe them to be wrong. It'd be nice if our community had a common understanding of the LGPL. There seems to be a lot of confusion.
Nope. The LGPL basically requires you to make sure that the end user can replace the LGPLed code with a modified but ABI-compatible version (for instance, because there's some bug in the code). Think back to the libpng security vulnerability a few years ago, for example - because that was under a more permissive license than the LGPL, users of proprietary software that included the insecure version couldn't update to a fixed version by themselves and were reliant on the companies that supplied them the software.
That may be correct, but its an engineering description of a legal document. We're great at deconstructing things - lawyers are great about enforcing the letter. SO I'm not sure anything that boils down to "The LGPL basically requires..." can be trusted - certainly that argument has no weight with our lawyers.
Consider for a moment anything shipped on an iPad or iPhone. How does the user replace pieces of your application, exactly? Its not possible, by design (thank you Apple).
Speaking as an open source lawyer, the question of whether it's legal to use LGPL 2.0/2.1 software in an app store app is a very open one, exactly for the reason given above. You will find people taking opinions on both sides.
It certainly happens that people use LGPL 2.1 code in IOS apps, but that doesn't mean it's okay.
The answer is more clear for other licenses, including LGPL v3.
I wouldn't trust what you see app stores doing as "okay". Among other things, I do due diligence on mergers/acquisitions, and without a doubt, app store apps are one of the places I see the most license problems.
Our target is everywhere. So no, not possible on many platforms.
And the terms become more restrictive with every iteration. That general theme may be present but in the end you have to conform exactly to how the license is written. The verbiage about linkages etc becomes meaningless on some platform (those without a loader for instance). Where does that leave you, legally? I learn to never ask a lawyer techical engineering questions - like the old line about teaching a pig to sing.
Your last point is actually pretty wrong.
I've helped write linkers and loaders, and can sit around and have a combined technical and legal discussion about the impacts of linking in various ways all day if you like.
If you've learned never to ask a lawyer technical engineering questions, you need better lawyers.
Realistically, if your lawyers don't actually understand how your code operates or what it does, at a deep technical level, the advice they give is not going to be all that great or even right.
I worked with the legal department at my company to get a list of approved open source licenses for components included in our applications. The GPL was immediately ruled out. Because of the GPL they spent several weeks scrutinizing the LGPL. They approved it.
Obviously your mileage has varied with your lawyers. And if we want to keep our jobs we can't cross the lawyers, even if we believe them to be wrong. It'd be nice if our community had a common understanding of the LGPL. There seems to be a lot of confusion.