License Class: GNU Lesser General Public Licenses (LGPL)

The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) provides the community a less restrictive alternative to the General Public License (GPL). The LGPL is a 'weak copyleft' license. Copyleft licenses - of which the GPL is the most commonly used - require any work originating in the licensed code to be made available under the same provisions. This 'weak copyleft' alternative permits projects using the LGPL license to link to projects that use less restrictive licenses.

Some additional facts regarding the license include:

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has approved this license as an Open Source license. Open Source approved licenses comply with the OSI criteria. Such criteria include provisions supporting both the free redistribution of aggregate and derived products, and the requirement that source code be made available with the distributions of aggregate and derivative products.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has classified this license as a Free Software license. Free Software licenses meet the FSF's criteria for supporting the user's freedom to run, study, redistribute and improve the program.
This license is a weak copyleft license. Copyleft licenses - of which the GPL is the most commonly used - require any work originating in the licensed code to be made available under the same provisions. Weak copyleft licenses are mainly used for software libraries. Other software can be linked with the weak copyleft licensed library, and then redistributed under a different license. Only changes to the actual copylefted software must be under the copyleft license.

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License Class: GNU Lesser General Public Licenses (LGPL)

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