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News > LicenseFAQ

LicenseFAQ

Hibernate is Free Software. The LGPL license is sufficiently flexible to allow the use of Hibernate in both open source and commercial projects. Using Hibernate (by importing Hibernate's public interfaces in your Java code), and extending Hibernate (by subclassing) is considered by the authors of Hibernate to be dynamic linking. Hence our interpretation of the LGPL is that the use of the unmodified Hibernate source or binary does not affect the license of your application code.

If you modify Hibernate and redistribute your modifications, the LGPL applies.

C3P0 is GPL and distributed with Hibernate, is that a problem?

No, it is not a problem unless you are using both Hibernate and C3P0. The Hibernate project has special permission to redistribute C3P0.

Per default, GPL software (such as C3P0) cannot be distributed/used inside software that is not GPL compliant - including LGPL software such as Hibernate.

Thus, we have received the following "special permission" for C3P0:

"I hereby grant the Hibernate project permission to use, link to, and
distribute c3p0 with Hibernate so long as all Hibernate code is made
available under LGPL and/or GPL terms."
- Steve Waldman (Owner and maintainer of C3P0 project)

This permission allows the Hibernate team to distribute C3P0, but it does not allow users of Hibernate that want to use C3P0 to not comply with GPL.

If you use Hibernate together with C3P0 you shall conform to the GPL license as stated by C3P0, otherwise you shall conform to the LGPL license as stated and interpreted by Hibernate.

      

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