Sony BDP-S280 - Manual (Page 28)

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 difference between a “work based on
the library” and a “work that uses the library”. The
former contains code derived from the library, whereas
the latter must be combined with the library in order to
run.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
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COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND
MODIFICATION
0. This License Agreement applies to any software
library or other program which contains a notice