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Legal Information
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
V ersion 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 T emple 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.
PREAMBLE
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share
and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee
your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free
for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software
Foundation’ s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using
it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library
General Public License instead.) Y ou can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, 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 or use
pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
T o protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny
you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate
to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you
modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or
for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. Y ou must make
sure that they , too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them
these terms so they know their rights.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you
this license which gives you legal permission to copy , distribute and/or modify the
software.
Also, for each author’ s protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone
understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is
modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what
they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not
reflect on the original authors’ reputations.
Finally , any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to
avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent
licenses, in effect making the program proprietary . T o prevent this, we have made it
clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone’ s free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow .
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE - TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING,
DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICA TION
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed
by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General
Public License. The “Program”, below , refers to any such program or work, and a
“work based on the Program” means either the Program or any derivative work under
copyright law: that is to say , a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either
verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter ,
translation is included without limitation in the term “modification”.) Each licensee
is addressed as “you”.
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this
License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted,
and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work
based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
1. Y ou may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program’ s source code as you
receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish
on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact
all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give
any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
Y ou may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy , and you may at your
option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus
forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or
work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these
conditions:
a) Y ou must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you
changed the files and the date of any change.
b) Y ou must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in
part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be
licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of
this License.
c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run,
you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most
ordinary way , to print or display an announcement including an appropriate
copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that
you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under
these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License.
(Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print
such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to
print an announcement.)
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections
of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered
independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do
not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when
you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the
Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose
permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and
every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to
work written entirely by you; rather , the intent is to exercise the right to control the
distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the
Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution
medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
3. Y ou may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2)
in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided
that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source
code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above