liblzma is in the public domain. You can do whatever you want with the files that have been put into the public domain. If you find public domain legally problematic, take the previous sentence as a license grant. If you still find the lack of copyright legally problematic, you have too many lawyers. As usual, this software is provided "as is", without any warranty. If you copy significant amounts of public domain code from XZ Utils into your project, acknowledging this somewhere in your software is polite (especially if it is proprietary, non-free software), but naturally it is not legally required. Here is an example of a good notice to put into "about box" or into documentation: This software includes code from XZ Utils .