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Important Information | CONSTANT [Licence and trademark notice]Licence and trademark notice
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom of use, not price. Our General Public Licenses
are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this
service if you wish); that you receive source code or can get it if you want it; that you can change the software
and use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you are informed that you can do these things.
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
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