SOIL seems to be simple and easy to set up, but there seems to little to no documentation or tutorials for it, but if someone has an excellent resource for that, I might look into it.

There aren't any tutorials precisely because it is that simple. The documentation is in the header file, there are only about 5 functions you need to use, and they are all pretty self-explanatory... Hell, I think the one-line example from the SOIL home-page says 90% of what you need to know:

/* load an image file directly as a new OpenGL texture */
GLuint tex_2d = SOIL_load_OGL_texture
(
"img.png",
SOIL_LOAD_AUTO,
SOIL_CREATE_NEW_ID,
SOIL_FLAG_MIPMAPS | SOIL_FLAG_INVERT_Y | SOIL_FLAG_NTSC_SAFE_RGB | SOIL_FLAG_COMPRESS_TO_DXT
);


And mdwh, that is the problem. Now I'm okay with being wrong about this, so don't hesitate to correct me, but the president of the company I work for now warned me against adding any LGPL code to my engine, due to the fact that I may have to release my source code, which is an impossibility if I'm working on something with confidential code, like Xbox, PS3, Wii, or anything like that, and that is absolutely where I would like to head one day.

I think your president may be mixing up the LGPL with the GPL; I wonder has he actually even read the text of either license?

Summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License

The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter allows the work to be linked with (in the case of a library, 'used by') a non-(L)GPLed program, regardless of whether it is free software or proprietary software. The non-(L)GPLed program can then be distributed under any terms...[/quote]

Many software licenses which are initially percieved as "free" are actually quite a bit more permissive than the standard GPL when you look closer at them; even Microsoft used libjpeg in earlier versions of Internet Explorer (and acknowledged the fact on it's splash screen or Help/About screen - can't remember which).

I think your president may be mixing up the LGPL with the GPL; I wonder has he actually even read the text of either license?

It's not that unusual for workplaces to ban the LGPL as well as the GPL.

In particular, the LGPL specifies that the end user must be able to re-link against a newer version of the library, which is impossible on most consoles/embedded platforms, since they don't have any such concept of dynamic linking (nor generally the level of user access that would be required to replace the library in question).