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