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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 libraries, is covered by the
ordinary GNU General Public License. This license, the GNU Les-
ser 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 spea-
king 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" General Public License because it
does Less to protect the user's freedom than the ordinary Gene-
ral 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
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