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ordinary General Public License is the bet-
ter strategy to use in any particular case,
based on the explanations below.
When we speak of free software, we are
referring to freedom of use, not price. Our
General Public Licenses are designed to
make sure that you have the freedom to
distribute copies of free software (and
charge for this service if you wish); that you
receive source code or can get it if you
want it; that you can change the software
and use pieces of it in new free programs;
and that you are informed that you can do
these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make
restrictions that forbid distributors to deny
you these rights or to ask you to surrender
these rights. These restrictions translate to
certain responsibilities for you if you distrib-
ute 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 fi les 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 war-
ranty for the free library. Also, if the library
is modifi ed 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 specifi ed in this
license.
Most GNU software, including some librar-
ies, 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 speak-
ing a combined work, a derivative of the
original library. The ordinary General Public
License therefore permits such linking
only if the entire combination fi ts 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" Gen-
eral 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
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