Hi Takashi,
Thanks for taking time to address this issue.
Yes, rate_samplerate.c is dual licensed (LGPL or GPLv2). However, depending on one's interpretation, someone MAY conclude that the rate_samplerate plugin is licensed as GPLv2 for a commercial entity such as Broadcom.
The first line in the license is:
"This plugin code is supposed to be used and distributed primarily under GPL v2 or later..."
The second line says:
"However, if you already own a commercial license to use libsamplerate for dynamic linking, this plugin code can be used and distributed also under LGPL v2.1 or later."
But Broadcom does not own a "commercial license to use libsamplerate" since libsamplerate basically eliminated the need for a commercial license in 2016 when it was released with the 2-Clause BSD license. So it is not clear whether the first sentence (GPLv2) or the second sentence (LGPLv2) applies to Broadcom.
So I am trying to eliminate any possibility of different interpretations by requesting that the license in rate_samplerate.c and the alsa-plugins be updated to reflect the current license status of libsamplerate.
Thank you, Michael
On Fri, Oct 6, 2023 at 1:55 AM Takashi Iwai tiwai@suse.de wrote:
On Wed, 27 Sep 2023 20:26:31 +0200, Michael Wang wrote:
Hi Alsa-devs and Mr Iwai,
Sorry for the spam, I am resending this in plain text mode this time.
It seems the only thing in alsa-plugins that has a GPL license is rate/rate_samplerate.c, and that is due to the license of libsamplerate. But in 2016, libsamplerate dropped the commercial/GPL part of its license and was released with the 2-Clause BSD license. So I was wondering if the license for rate_samplerate.c can be updated to remove the GPL license, which means the COPYING.GPL file can also be removed from the alsa-plugins package?
I have created issue #54 in github.com/alsa-project/alsa-plugins, but so far, no action.
Should I submit a pull request?
The code allows LGPL, too. What's the problem with it?
thanks,
Takashi