The Hibernate team is ecstatic to report that we have successfully relicensed Hibernate ORM under the Apache 2.0 license! As discussed previously, this decision was solely about opening up wider acceptance amongst Apache/Jakarta projects and other places that (for whatever reasons) disallow the LGPL license.
This was a massive effort on the part of many people and took nearly 2 years to complete. We are grateful to all the contributors who explicitly agreed to allow the relicensing of their contributions - thank you!
This will only be applicable to versions moving foward from 7.0.0.Beta4. We will not be backporting any relicensing to any 6.x, 5.x, etc branches. |
A first release of ORM 7.0 covered under the Apache 2.0 License will be released early next week!
Casualties
There were a few unfortunate casualties of this process where we were unable to get agreement for relicensing specific contributions which required removing some functionality.
hibernate-envers
We were unable to get explicit agreement for too many contributions to hibernate-envers
and did not feel comfortable relicensing it. For the time being, hibernate-envers
has been removed from the Hibernate repository and is not published with the rest of Hibernate ORM. The code has been temporarily moved to the following locations keeping
all of the commit history intact:
-
For main/test code - https://github.com/sebersole/hibernate-envers-lgpl
-
For documentation - https://github.com/sebersole/hibernate-envers-docs-lgpl
We are still looking into relicensing hibernate-envers
and how to publish it going forward. Stay tuned for more information. In the meantime,
users wanting to continue using hibernate-envers
have 2 options:
-
Continue to use older released versions
-
Build hibernate-envers from the repository mentioned above
Both of these options continue to fall under the terms of the LGPL. |