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Consider re- or dual-licensing the library under LGPL

Open bandrews opened this issue 5 months ago • 2 comments

Currently, the ESP8266Audio library is licensed under the GPL 3.0 license. One of the features of this license is that it requires all code it is linked with to also be licensed under GPL 3.0, which means this library can't be used for anything that links with any commercial code.

I'm working on an ESP32-based device that, as one of several features, will offer simple audio playback via an I2S audio chip. Audio is one of many features of the device, and it depends on some commercial device driver libraries from vendors which are closed-source. (Ugh.) But I'd love to adopt ESP8266Audio rather than falling back on the ESP-IDF.

Would you consider re- or dual-licensing this library under the LGPL? This would maintain the requirement for all contributions to be shared openly, but would permit linking against closed-source code. In addition to resolving theoretical conflicts with closed-source libraries, it would also encourage use of ESP8266Audio instead of the ESP-IDF audio bits and bobs in commercial projects like mine overall, increasing the likelihood of community bug fixes and contributions that benefit all users of the library.

(Totally understand if the answer is no due to a principled belief in the full GPL to explicitly exclude uses like mine, but figured it was worth asking!)

bandrews avatar May 13 '25 16:05 bandrews