Sony BDP-S280 - Manual (Page 15)

a program 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.
Our method of protecting your rights has two steps: (1)
copyright the library, and (2) offer you this license
which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute
and/or modify the library.
Also, for each distributor's protection, we want to make
certain that everyone understands that there is no
warranty for this free library. If the library is modified
by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients
to know that what they have is not the original version,
so that any problems introduced by others will not
reflect on the original authors' reputations.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by
software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that
companies distributing free software will individually
obtain patent licenses, thus in effect transforming the
program into proprietary software. To prevent this, we
have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for
everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Most GNU software, including some libraries, is
covered by the ordinary GNU General Public License,
which was designed for utility programs. This license,
the GNU Library General Public License, applies to
certain designated libraries. This license is quite
different from the ordinary one; be sure to read it in full,
and don't assume that anything in it is the same as in the
ordinary license.
The reason we have a separate public license for some
libraries is that they blur the distinction we usually
make between modifying or adding to a program and
simply using it. Linking a program with a library,
without changing the library, is in some sense simply
using the library, and is analogous to running a utility
program or application program. However, in a textual
and legal sense, the linked executable is a combined
work, a derivative of the original library, and the
ordinary General Public License treats it as such.
Because of this blurred distinction, using the ordinary
General Public License for libraries did not effectively
promote software sharing, because most developers did
not use the libraries. We concluded that weaker