[alsa-devel] Alsa-Plugin 1.0.25 License

[Tanu Kaskinen]

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.
> > 
> > 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.

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

-- 
Tanu

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