LGPL v3 Licensing – What Constitutes ‘Distributing’?

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I am considering basing some new software on a LGPL web application. I want to utilize this new software for creating one website for my employer, and we do not intend to sell or distribute the software itself to anybody. Does publishing web pages from LGPL software constitute "distributing" in the license, so I would have to publish our changes to the LGPL code as well?

I understand that none of you are lawyers so IANAL is implied. I also understand that I could contact the developers of the LGPL software and ask for a different license.

Best Answer

There's a variant of the GPLv3 called the "Affero GPL v3". To quote gnu.org,

The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run the program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the program that it's running. If what's running there is your modified version of the program, the server's users must get the source code as you modified it.

It follows that "running a program on the server" is not distribution; the base GPLv3 already covered that.

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