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free programs. These disadvantages are the reason we use the ordinary General
Public License for many libraries. However, the Lesser license provides advantages
in certain special circumstances.
For example, on rare occasions, there may be a special need to encourage the
widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To
achieve this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library. A more
frequent case is that a free library does the same job as widely used non-free
libraries. In this case, there is little to gain by limiting the free library to free
software only, so we use the Lesser General Public License.
In other cases, permission to use a particular library in non-free programs enables
a greater number of people to use a large body of free software. For example,
permission to use the GNU C Library in non-free programs enables many more
people to use the whole GNU operating system, as well as its variant, the
GNU/Linux operating system.
Although the Lesser General Public License is Less protective of the users' freedom,
it does ensure that the user of a program that is linked with the Library has the
freedom and the wherewithal to run that program using a modified version of the
Library.
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