[alsa-devel] Alsa-Plugin 1.0.25 License
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.
https://repology.org/project/alsa-plugins/packages
Regards K. Filer
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. 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).
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).
One more comment...
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. 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.
Relicensing shouldn't be that hard after all, if that's desired (I think it would be a good idea). Now that I looked, there actually aren't many contributors to that plugin, only Takashi and Jaroslav. Diego E. 'Flameeyes' Pettenò also has a commit, but it only changes one line in the build system.
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).
On Tue, 06 Aug 2019 17:36:06 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
One more comment...
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. 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.
Relicensing shouldn't be that hard after all, if that's desired (I think it would be a good idea). Now that I looked, there actually aren't many contributors to that plugin, only Takashi and Jaroslav. Diego E. 'Flameeyes' Pettenò also has a commit, but it only changes one line in the build system.
I don't mind relicensing at all. But the only concern is that no one but for lawyers can confirm its validity...
thanks,
Takashi
Thanks for your response.
- K.Filer
On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 9:15 PM Takashi Iwai tiwai@suse.de wrote:
On Tue, 06 Aug 2019 17:36:06 +0200, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
One more comment...
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. 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.
Relicensing shouldn't be that hard after all, if that's desired (I think it would be a good idea). Now that I looked, there actually aren't many contributors to that plugin, only Takashi and Jaroslav. Diego E. 'Flameeyes' Pettenò also has a commit, but it only changes one line in the build system.
I don't mind relicensing at all. But the only concern is that no one but for lawyers can confirm its validity...
thanks,
Takashi
On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 10:44:25PM +0530, karina filer wrote:
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.
You don't need to care, except if you do use open source code in distributed closed source programs (aka windows and macos).
participants (4)
-
karina filer -
sylvain.bertrand＠gmail.com -
Takashi Iwai -
Tanu Kaskinen