Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX VERSION 3.1.0_BETA2 - Manual (Page 251)

14 Third-party licenses
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is de-
signed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a “work
that uses the Library”. Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library,
and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
However, linking a “work that uses the Library” with the Library creates an exe-
cutable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library),
rather than a “work that uses the library”. The executable is therefore covered by this
License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.
When a “work that uses the Library” uses material from a header file that is part of
the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even
though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work
can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for
this to be true is not precisely defined by law.
If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and
accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length),
then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a
derivative work. (Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library
will still fall under Section 6.) Otherwise, if the work is a derivative of the Library,
you may distribute the object code for the work under the terms of Section 6. Any
executables containing that work also fall under Section 6, whether or not they are
linked directly with the Library itself.
6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a “work
that uses the Library” with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the
Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms
permit modification of the work for the customer’s own use and reverse engineering
for debugging such modifications.
You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used
in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply
a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you
must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference
directing the user to the copy of this License. Also, you must do one of these things:
a) Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source
code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must
be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above); and, if the work is an executable linked
with the Library, with the complete machine-readable “work that uses the Library”,
as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then
relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library. (It is under-
stood that the user who changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not
necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified definitions.)
b) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable
mechanism is one that (1) uses at run time a copy of the library already present on
the user’s computer system, rather than copying library functions into the executable,
and (2) will operate properly with a modified version of the library, if the user installs
one, as long as the modified version is interface-compatible with the version that the
work was made with.
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