Verizon Network Extender User Manual

Page 43

Advertising
background image

41

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

Verizon - WSE.book Page 41 Thursday, December 9, 2010 11:07 AM

Advertising