32 english – Toshiba BDX2250 User Manual

Page 32

English

Preamble

The licenses for most software are designed to take away

your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU

General Public Licenses are intended to guarantee your

freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the

software is free for all its users.

This license, the Lesser General Public License, applies to

some specially designated software packages--typically

libraries--of the Free Software Foundation and other authors

who decide to use it. You can use it too, but we suggest you

first think carefully about whether this license or the ordinary

General Public License is the better strategy to use in any

particular case, based on the explanations below.

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

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responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the library or

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For example, if you distribute copies of the library, whether

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rights that we gave you. You must make sure that they,

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library after making changes to the library and recompiling

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rights.

We protect your rights with a two-step method: (1) we

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the library.

To protect each distributor, we want to make it very

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the recipients should know that what they have is not the

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by others. Finally, software patents pose a constant threat

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sure that a company cannot effectively restrict the users

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a patent holder. Therefore, we insist that any patent

license obtained for a version of the library must be

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Most GNU software, including some libraries, is

covered by the ordinary GNU General Public Li-

cense. This license, the GNU Lesser General Public

License, applies to certain designated libraries, and

is quite different from the ordinary General Pub-

lic 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

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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

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distribution and modification follow. Pay close attention to

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derived from the library, whereas the latter must be combined

with the library in order to run.

GNU LESSER GENERAL PULIC LICENSE

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION

AND MODIFICATION

0. This License Agreement applies to any software library

or other program which contains a notice placed by the

distributed under the terms of this Lesser General Public

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The "Library", below, refers to any such software library

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