Samsung SL-M4020ND Open Source Announcement Ver.1.00 (English) - Page 132

The Lesser General

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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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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.