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Samsung SL-M2835DW-XAA User Manual

Page 136

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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.

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