Sony COM-2BLACK User Manual

Page 14

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COM-2.US.3-213-856-11(1)

1

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.

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