On Tue, 2019-08-06 at 16:20 +0300, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
On Mon, 2019-08-05 at 22:44 +0530, karina filer wrote:
Hi Team,
Greetings !!
I am facing difficulty to understand the Alsa-Plugin Licensing, Could you please help me to make understand?, Is it under GPL 2.0 or LGPL 2.1 because after extracting the folder I can see 2 copying file one for GPL and other for LGPL.
alsa-plugins seems to lack a README or other overview document about the licensing... alsa-plugins is primarily licensed under LGPL 2.1, and to my knowledge the only exception is the libsamplerate based rate plugin.
I now had a look at the link you provided, and there I saw that BSD-3- Clause and MIT were also mentioned. I had a closer look at the code, and I found two more exceptions: the libspeexdsp based rate plugin (under the pph directory) seems to be licensed under BSD-3-Clause, and rate-lav/gcd.h is licensed under MIT (rate-lav/rate_lavrate.c is LGPL, however).
The licensing is explained here:
https://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-plugins.git;a=blob;f=rate/rate_samplera...
So this particluar rate plugin is licensed under GPL 2.0 "to follow the license of libsamplerate", unless you have a commercial license to libsamplerate. I don't think the rationale for that exception makes much sense (LGPL would have worked just fine, as far as I can tell), but at this point relicensing may be very difficult due to many contributors.
libsamplerate was relicensed under the 2-clause BSD license in 2016[1], which may or may not allow you to apply LGPL to the rate plugin (my guess would be that it doesn't allow you to do that, but IANAL).