- Developers that use our General Public Licenses protect your rights
-with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer
-you this License which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute
-and/or modify the software.
-
- A secondary benefit of defending all users' freedom is that
-improvements made in alternate versions of the program, if they
-receive widespread use, become available for other developers to
-incorporate. Many developers of free software are heartened and
-encouraged by the resulting cooperation. However, in the case of
-software used on network servers, this result may fail to come about.
-The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and
-letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its
-source code to the public.
-
- The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to
-ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available
-to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to
-provide the source code of the modified version running there to the
-users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on
-a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source
-code of the modified version.
-
- An older license, called the Affero General Public License and
-published by Affero, was designed to accomplish similar goals. This is
-a different license, not a version of the Affero GPL, but Affero has
-released a new version of the Affero GPL which permits relicensing under
-this license.
+ To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you
+these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have
+certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if
+you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
+
+ For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
+gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same
+freedoms that you received. You 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.
+
+ Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps:
+(1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License
+giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.
+
+ For the developers' and authors' protection, the GPL clearly explains
+that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users' and
+authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as
+changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to
+authors of previous versions.
+
+ Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run
+modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer
+can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of
+protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic
+pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to
+use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we
+have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those
+products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we
+stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions
+of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.
+
+ Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents.
+States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of
+software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to
+avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could
+make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that
+patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.