1 All PulseAudio source files are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
2 License. (see file LGPL for details)
4 However, the server side has optional GPL dependencies. These include the
5 libsamplerate and gdbm (core libraries), LIRC (lirc module), FFTW (equalizer
6 module) and bluez (bluetooth proximity helper program) libraries, although
7 others may also be included in the future. If PulseAudio is compiled with these
8 optional components, this effectively downgrades the license of the server part
9 to GPL (see the file GPL for details), exercising section 3 of the LGPL. In
10 such circumstances, you should treat the client library (libpulse) of PulseAudio
11 as being LGPL licensed and the server part (libpulsecore) as being GPL licensed.
12 Since the PulseAudio daemon, tests, various utilities/helpers and the modules
13 link to libpulsecore and/or the afore mentioned optional GPL dependencies they
14 are of course also GPL licensed also in this scenario.
16 Andre Adrian's echo cancellation implementation is licensed under a less
17 restrictive license - see src/modules/echo-cancel/adrian-license.txt for
20 Some other files pulled into PA source (i.e. reference implementations that are
21 considered too small and stable to be considered as an external library) use the
22 more permissive MIT license. This include the device reservation DBus protocol
23 and realtime kit implementations.
25 Additionally, a more permissive Sun license is used for code that performs
26 u-law, A-law and linear PCM conversions.
28 While we attempt to provide a summary here, it is the ultimate responsibility of
29 the packager to ensure the components they use in their build of PulseAudio
30 meets their license requirements.