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FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. All copyrights
are identified in more detail in the library source code. The library source code and a copy of the GNU Lesser General
Public License can at least for a period of three years be downloaded from http://www.telekom.de/faq.
GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1, February 1999
Copyright (C) 1991, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
[This is the first released version of the Lesser GPL. It also counts as the successor of the GNU Library Public License,
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--of the Free Software Foundation and other authors who decide to use it. You can
use it too, but we suggest you first think 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 make sure that you have the
freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish); that you receive source code or
can get it if you want it; that you can change the software and use pieces of it in new free programs; 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
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must show them these terms so they know their rights. We protect your rights with a two-step method: (1) we copyright
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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 modified by someone else and passed on, the recipients should know that what they have is not the original
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Finally, software patents pose a constant threat to the existence of any free program. We wish to make sure that a
company cannot effectively restrict the users of 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,
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