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statically or using a shared library, the combination of
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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 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
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