[pulseaudio-discuss] Change the qpaeq license from AGPL to LGPL?

[Tanu Kaskinen]

Hi all,

A bug was recently filed about the top-level LICENSE file not
mentioning the AGPL licensing of qpaeq:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92802

I was surprised to find out that qpaeq is licensed under AGPL. While we
could simply fix the top-level LICENSE file, I would prefer to change
the qpaeq license to LGPL v2.1 instead to be in line with the rest of
the PulseAudio code. I don't have anything against AGPL as such, but I
am against complicating the licensing terms of PulseAudio for no good
reason.

In order to be able to change the license, we need an explicit
permission to do so from everyone who holds copyright to any part of
the code of qpaeq. Below is a list of every qpaeq contributor. I'm not
sure every small change is copyrightable, but I don't want to ignore
anyone's contribution at this point. If we don't get the permission
from everyone, we can at that point discuss if we can change the
license anyway.

The contributors:

Jason Newton

    added qpaeq script for GUI equalizer control to src/util
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=41853cc7c01d3b400e781bb9db8c09befd04685b

    remove .py extension from qpaeq
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=77c6b696560f460e74af85d069863e8337e99d33

    src/utils/qpaeq: added more friendly error messages to common errors
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=4eb65a0a46bd880faf620db3dff94f82f966bd61

Maarten Bosmans

    qpaeq: Make it python3 and python2 compatible
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=b453e13edef8be95d70d837466e911b883faf476

Arun Raghavan

    utils: Typo fixes in qpaeq
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=bb2e60a142ca0a2f95a168751073e17f7623a552

Matěj Laitl

    qpaeq: Try to load equalizer module before failing, better error messages
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=f36148a82e99b40a0adebfdf10c83e480b484847

Aidan Gauland

    qpaeq: Don't set font-size on widgets
    https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/commit/?id=be4619e3f7b98a0595418bd7d13b7504ffb5136f

If you're one of the listed contributors, please reply to this mail,
stating whether you give permission to change the license of the code
you wrote to LGPL v2.1.

Of course, if anyone (contributor or not) thinks relicensing is a bad
idea, speak up. We can always just add a note about AGPL to the top-
level LICENSE.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk