The maintainers of the Hibernate suite of projects announced on March 14 that Hibernate ORM, a popular object-relational mapping tool for Java, will be moving from the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) to the Apache License. According to the maintainers, “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 is significant because it’s an instance of a project moving from a more restrictive license to a less restrictive license. The LGPL is what’s known as a copyleft license (albeit a “weak” one). Copyleft licenses require licensees who distribute copyleft-licensed software to disclose the source code of their distributed versions. Apache is what’s known as a permissive license. Permissive licenses typically only require licensees who distribute permissively licensed software to provide notice and attribution.

Though Hibernate is not a COSS venture per se, it is chiefly supported by Red Hat and most of its maintainers are employed by Red Hat. In light of several popular open source projects adopting more restrictive licenses or abandoning open source altogether, Hibernate ORM stands out as an example of a project doing the opposite.