User's Manual

Our method of protecting your rights has two steps: (1) copyright the library, and (2) offer you this

license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the library.

Also, for each distributor's protection, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there

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Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger

that companies distributing free software will individually obtain patent licenses, thus in effect

transforming the program into proprietary software. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any

atent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

Most GNU software, including some libraries, is covered by the ordinary GNU General Public

License, which was designed for utility programs. This license, the GNU Library General Public

License, applies to certain designated libraries. This license is quite different from the ordinary one;

be sure to read it in full, and don't assume that anything in it is the same as in the ordinary license.

The reason we have a separate public license for some libraries is that they blur the distinction we

usually make between modifying or adding to a program and simply using it. Linking a program

with a library, without changing the library, is in some sense simply using the library, and is

analogous to running a utility program or application program. However, in a textual and legal sense,

the linked executable is a combined work, a derivative of the original library, and the ordinary

General Public License treats it as such.

Because of this blurred distinction, using the ordinary General Public License for libraries did not

effectively promote software sharing, because most developers did not use the libraries. We

concluded that weaker conditions might promote sharing better.

However, unrestricted linking of non-free programs would deprive the users of those programs of all

benefit from the free status of the libraries themselves. This Library General Public License is

intended to permit developers of non-free programs to use free libraries, while preserving your

freedom as a user of such programs to change the free libraries that are incorporated in them. (We

have not seen how to achieve this as regards changes in header files, but we have achieved it as

regards changes in the actual functions of the Library.) The hope is that this will lead to faster

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The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. Pay close

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The former contains code derived from the library, while the latter only works together with the

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ote that it is possible for a library to be covered by the ordinary General Public License rather than

by this special one.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND

MODIFICATION

0. This License Agreement applies to any software library which contains a notice placed by the

Library General Public License (also called "this License"). Each licensee is addressed as

"you".

A "librar

" means a collection of software functions and/or data

are

so as to be