You are not distributing binaries built from LGPL-licensed source code. You are distributing binaries linked to an LGPL-ed license library. That is very different. If you patch Hibernate ORM and you provide a binary of Hibernate ORM itself to your customers, then you need to provide the sources of your patched version of Hibernate ORM (and only the sources of Hibernate ORM) to the ones to which you distribute this patched version of Hibernate ORM (it doesn’t even need to be public). But that doesn’t have any impact on your application’s proprietary code. You can keep it proprietary and not provide the source code. That’s the main difference between GPL and LGPL. Hibernate ORM is LGPL, not GPL. And I would dare to say that a vast majority of the applications built with Hibernate ORM are proprietary. |