GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3
Software licences are designed to govern users’ use of the software products to which they are applied. Many software licences are designed to limit the activities which users may perform. Copying, redistribution and modification are common activities which a licence will restrict. Intellectual Property rights are carefully guarded by such documents.
Open Source Software is becoming increasingly common. It is now entirely possible to have a fully functional personal computer, suitable for home or business use (and meeting all the needs thereof) using nothing other than open source software. In many cases, the software licences used with such software will be quite different to those used in proprietary software.
This document has been reproduced by Simply-docs with the permission and approval of the Open Source Initiative and is designed to be applied to a wide variety of software.
The GNU Lesser General Public License Version 3 (previously known as the Library General Public License) is, like it’s larger brother, a permissive “copyleft” licence. Unlike the GNU General Public License, the Lesser General Public License (“LGPL”) is not designed for use with executable programs. Rather, it is to be used with software libraries. Users of software covered by this open source software licence are free to use that software for any purpose, study and adapt the program, redistribute copies of the program and make their own improvements to that program and release those improvements to the general public.
When distributing copies of programs, users of this licence must use a suitable copyright notice accompanied by a disclaimer of warranty. Notices referring to the licence must also be incorporated. Furthermore, any recipients of the program must be provided with a copy of this licence along with the program.
Users of software under this licence are free to make modifications, however it is important to note that any such modifications must also be distributed under this licence. Notwithstanding this, any programs that link to the library need not be licensed under the terms of the LGPL. They may be licensed under any terms of the user’s choosing (provided the library itself can be changed).
Finally, any copy or distribution of the program must include the complete machine readable source code, or at least an offer to provide that code on request.
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