>Most people whom I know who have actually worked with the GPL do not
>feel that section 10 of the GPL would restrict a library so long as the
>original library code (and any modifications made by the vendor) are
>made freely available.

Have you talked to Richard Stallman about this?   I think you would find
his opinion completely different.  Why do I say this?  I wrote gdbm
for the FSF and they hold the copyright and it is currently distributed
under the GPL, not the LGPL.  The licensing question comes up very often
and Stallman maintains (as far as I understand his position) that any
program that makes calls to gdbm falls under the GPL and must be free.
He will not put gdbm under the LGPL because he sees it as a less
restrictive license.

>Unfortunately there has not, to my knowledge, ever been any "free"
>library distributed with only the GPL covering its copyright, at least
>not by the Free Software Foundation, so this fact has not, to the best
>of my knowledge, been tested.  (I can't find an early copy of glibc.  It
>may have been distributed under GPL.)

See the above.  (gdbm is a library doing some of the same things as DB-2.x
and is under the GPL and the copyright owned by the FSF.)

-- 
Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        !gifs: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil