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GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Version 2.1, February 1999
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
version 2, hence the version number 2.1.]
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-
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
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.
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,
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
the original author’s reputation will not be affected by problems that might be introduced by others.
cannot effectively restrict the users of a free program by obtaining a restrictive license from a patent holder. Therefore, we
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
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.
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
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
the Library.
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.
BN68-01526B-CF.indb 84 2008-05-28 오후 9:03:45
