LGPL and Java

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

This week's issue of DWN, just out, contains an item reading

| LGPL affecting Client Java Code? [11]According to this [12]article,
| Dave Turner of the FSF has decreed that the steps required to use an
| LGPL'd Java library will actually infect client code with substantial
| GNU-ness via Section 6 of the LGPL.
|...
| 11. http://slashdot.org/developers/03/07/17/2257224.shtml
| 12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.poi.devel/5900

Could someone explain whether some facts got distorted on the way to
the DWN summary? The link [12] leads to some list archive where David
Turner is quoted as saying

|| This sort of linking falls under section 6 of the LGPL.

Hower, section 6 of the LGPL is exactly the clause that says that under
certain conditions it is *not* necessary:

| 6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or
|    link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a
|    work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work
|    under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit
|    modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse
|    engineering for debugging such modifications.
| [snip list of ways to permit the library-within-the-work to be changed.]

How on earth did that morph into a statement that the client code gets
"infected with substantial GNU-ness"?

I tried to look at the slashdot discussion that DWN referred to, but
it quickly deteriorated into a stock pro-and-contra-GPL flamewar.

-- 
Henning Makholm                "De kan rejse hid og did i verden nok så flot
                                 Og er helt fortrolig med alverdens militær"