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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,
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Finally, software patents pose a constant threat to the existence of any free program. We wish to make sure that a
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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
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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.
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