Samsung GT-S8500 Guide D'utilisation page 8

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 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
Présentation du guide d'utilisation
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