and recompiling it. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
We protect your rights with a two‐step method: (1) we copyright the library,
and (2) we offer you this license, which gives you legal permission to copy,
distribute and/or modify the library.
To protect each distributor, we want to make it very clear that there is no
warranty for the free library. Also, if the library is modified by someone else
and passed on, the recipients should know that what they have is not the
original version, so that the original author's reputation will not be affected by
problems that might be introduced by others.
Finally, software patents pose a constant threat to the existence of any free
program. We wish to make sure that a company cannot effectively restrict the
users of a free program by obtaining a restrictive license from a patent holder.
Therefore, we insist that any patent license obtained for a version of the
library must be consistent with the full freedom of use specified in this license.
Most GNU software, including some libraries, is covered by the ordinary GNU
General Public License. This license, the GNU Lesser General Public License,
applies to certain designated libraries, and is quite different from the ordinary
General Public License. We use this license for certain libraries in order to
permit linking those libraries into non‐free programs.
When a program is linked with a library, whether statically or using a shared
library, the combination of the two is legally speaking a combined work, a
derivative of the original library. The ordinary General Public License therefore
permits such linking only if the entire combination fits its criteria of freedom.
The Lesser General Public License permits more lax criteria for linking other
code with the library.
We call this license the "Lesser" General Public License because it does Less to
protect the user's freedom than the ordinary General Public License. It also
provides other free software developers less of an advantage over competing
non‐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.
Rechtliche Hinweise
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