Appendix D Open Software Announcements

NWA3000-N Series User’s Guide

347

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 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 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