[alsa-devel] Alsa-Plugin 1.0.25 License

[Tanu Kaskinen]

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.
> 
> https://repology.org/project/alsa-plugins/packages

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_samplerate.c

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).

[1] http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/license.html

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk
https://liberapay.com/tanuk