Cisco Cisco IPICS Release 2.1 Licensing Information

LicenseFAQ 

 

Hibernate is Free Software. 

 

Hibernate is licensed under the LGPL v2.1. The LGPL is sufficiently flexible to allow the use of Hibernate in both

open source and commercial projects. The LGPL guarantees that Hibernate and any modifications made to

Hibernate will stay open source, protecting our and your work. Anyone who wanted to release Hibernate under a

different license would have to obtain permission from hundreds of people who have contributed code to Hibernate,

which would be impractical. Hibernate is and will be open source distributed under the LGPL. 

 

Using Hibernate (by importing Hibernate's public interfaces in your Java code), and extending Hibernate (by

subclassing or implementation of an extension interface) 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 does not affect the

license of your application code. 

 

The use of the unmodified Hibernate binary of course never affects the license of your application or distribution.

The LGPL also forbids distribution for profit, so you will never have to pay money to any commercial entity for

using or integrating Hibernate. 

 

If you modify Hibernate and redistribute your modifications, the LGPL applies. Please submit any modifications to

our JIRA issue tracking system.

GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

 

Version 2.1, February 1999

 

Copyright (C) 1991, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  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.