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or to ask you to surrender these rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you
if you distribute copies of the library or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of the library, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the
recipients all the rights that we gave you. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. If you link other code with the library, you must provide complete object files to the
recipients, so that they can relink them with the library after making changes to the library 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.
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
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