1 <chapter id="chapter-licensing-advisory">
2 <title>GStreamer licensing</title>
3 <sect1 id="section-application-licensing">
4 <title>How to license the code you write for <application>GStreamer</application></title>
6 GStreamer is a plugin-based framework licensed under the LGPL. The reason
7 for this choice in licensing is to ensure that everyone can use GStreamer
8 to build applications using licenses of their choice.
11 To keep this policy viable, the GStreamer community has made a few
12 licensing rules for code to be included in GStreamer's core or GStreamer's
13 official modules, like our plugin packages. We require that all code going
14 into our core package is LGPL. For the plugin code, we require the use of
15 the LGPL for all plugins written from scratch or linking to external
16 libraries. The only exception to this is when plugins contain older code
17 under more liberal licenses (like the MPL or BSD). They can use those
18 licenses instead and will still be considered for inclusion. We do not
19 accept GPL code to be added to our plugins module, but we do accept
20 LGPL-licensed plugins using an external GPL library. The reason for
21 demanding plugins be licensed under the LGPL, even when using a GPL
22 library, is that other developers might want to use the plugin code as a
23 template for plugins linking to non-GPL libraries.
26 We also plan on splitting out the plugins using GPL libraries into a
27 separate package eventually and implement a system which makes sure an
28 application will not be able to access these plugins unless it uses some
29 special code to do so. The point of this is not to block GPL-licensed
30 plugins from being used and developed, but to make sure people are not
31 unintentionally violating the GPL license of said plugins.
34 This advisory is part of a bigger advisory with a FAQ which you can find
35 on the <ulink url="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/licensing.html">GStreamer website</ulink>