License

Licensing and copyright

Golf is Free Open Source software licensed under Apache License 2.

Discussion

The following discussion is not legal advice.

Dynamically linked libraries

Golf makes use of the following dynamically-linked libraries (with copyright by their respective owners), and only if your application actually uses them:

LGPL-licensed MariaDB C connector (https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-connector-c/),
Postgres-licensed Postgres C library (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq.html),
SQLite (public domain) SQLite C library (https://www.sqlite.org/docs.html),
Curl-licensed Curl library (https://curl.se/),
BSD-licensed PCRE2 (regex) library (https://www.pcre.org/),
MIT-licensed libXML2 library (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2),
OpenSSL-licensed OpenSSL/crypto library (https://www.openssl.org/).

You would install these libraries yourself (they are not distributed with Golf) as dependencies for compiling the source code.

Included libraries

Golf incorporates the source code of the following libraries:

BSD 3 Clause Licensed libbacktrace (https://github.com/ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace/). Copyright (C) 2012-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See btrace subdirectory for its LICENSE file with the copyright notice.
Open Market Licensed FastCGI library (https://fastcgi-archives.github.io/FastCGI_Developers_Kit_FastCGI.html). See fcgi subdirectory for its LICENSE file with the copyright notice.

Algorithms

Golf uses FNV-1a hash function, which is released in the public domain (see wikipedia page) and is not patented (see Landon Noll's web page).

Golf source code uses SPDX, an open ISO standard for communicating software bill of material information (such as licenses), to improve on open source licensing compliance for companies and communities.