Sony IPELA NSR Serie Manuel D'installation page 95

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
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
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.
The precise terms and conditions for copying,
distribution and modification follow. Pay close
attention to the difference between a "work based on
the library" and a "work that uses the library". The
former contains code derived from the library,
whereas the latter must be combined with the library
in order to run.
GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
95