Overland Storage SnapSAN S2000 User Manual page 200

SnapSAN S2000 User Guide
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 defacto 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.
10400277-004 07/2011
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