Audacity Forum

Dear Audacity forum,

This is a question about licensing and integrating Audacity in a commercial product. I'm aware of the Audacity's GPL license and its implications, although I'm not a lawyer and that's why I'd request your clarification on the following scenario:

The company that pays my bills sells sophisticated audio processing libraries. To give an idea, one of the features is automatic speaker segmentation: we're able to classify segments in an audio as belonging to different speakers. This feature essentially produces a set of labels marking the boundaries of each segment. Each speaker got a different label name. One idea that came to our minds is that Audacity labels fit very nicely with this schema and that it'd be a cool way of visually represent the output of our speaker segmentation, as well as give the chance to the user to manually fine tune segment boundaries or label names (this technology is not 100% perfect). Although out of the box fits very well, we are already thinking in some changes that we'd made to Audacity's user interface to improve the usability of this very specific use case.

If we go ahead and customize Audicity's UI (label handling, etc.), we won't have a problem releasing this source code to the community. On the other hand, it won't be possible for us to release our audio processing libraries as GPL... Are there any chances that we could deliver our libraries as an optional, closed-source, commercially licensed component and our customized version of Audacity as GPL?

If this is legally possible, and we decide to go ahead, I'll come back to this forum to see if any expert in Audacity UI inners would be interested in implementing the customization I'm talking about and get paid for it.

Kind regards,

Ed

Hi

Your "speaker segmentation" feature sounds interesting. We aren't lawyers either, but the general answer would be thus. For your commercial product, if you use Audacity's label code that would mean you have to license your entire product under GPL (v2 to be precise). Given you can't do that, that means you've got somehow to make Audacity's code available as a separate plug-in or installation, with its different licensing made clear to the user, and provide a link to our site.

Some views of GPL would state that allowing the user of the GPL application to add optional closed-source, commercially licensed components is impossible. We are usually more pragmatic than that, hence the Audacity user can for example add any commercially-licensed VST plug-in which executes in Audacity at runtime. However there is at least one GPL'd library we don't use because the author of that library disagrees with our interpretation of GPL. We are interested in optional plug-in functionality (and I'm sure we would like to know more about your proposed label improvements) but we wouldn't want to risk being unable to use more GPL'd libraries.

Therefore if the restrictions on using our code in your product aren't insuperable, the best plan would be for me to take this to our whole Team and see what tbey say. At least one developer does do paid work on Audacity improvements to the specifications of commercial clients, though this has hitherto (AFAIK) been for self-contained applications that are GPL-licensed and essentially based on Audacity, even though they may not be free of charge.



Gale

Sorry Gale, I never said thank you to your quick answer. It was almost a year ago. Shortly after your reply the project went cold until very recently. Upper management has taken this project out of the fridge and this is why I'm contacting the forum again.

The conditions would be as follow, please let me know if they are agreeable to the Audacity's team:

- The "speaker segmentation" feature will be an Audacity's plugin. This plugin will be closed source, commercially licensed by my employer.
- My employer is considering to outsource (paid work) the following:
- The effort needed to convert our speaker segmentation library into a working Audacity's plugin.
- A number of usability improvements, related mainly to Audacity's label management.
- My employer is willing to release back to the community for free any of those mentioned improvements. We would prefer to outsource the work to the current development team so the improvements will go in the direction of the larger plan that you guys might have in your minds for Audacity. We'll be happy if these improvements make Audacity a better tool.
- We don't have a problem with Audacity being available as a separated, optional component from my employer's product distribution. Also we will give due credit to Audacity and your team as we always do with every open source software that we use as part of our products (Apache, LGPL licenses so far).

How does this sound?

Kind regards,

Ed

Hi Ed,

I'll pass your ideas on and we'll take it from there. Is there any time scale for when you must start on this? Even if we are interested, we do have a pressing need at the moment to get our Beta version released as a new 2.0 stable.



Gale

Thank you again for the quick answer.

The ideal time frame is to have a first version of the integration with Audacity by the end of April. Further improvements can get scheduled for later. What's the expected release date for version 2.0?

If we continue further there are several details that we need to sort out. Please let me know who is the person I might contact.

Kind regards,

Ed

ed.fuentetaja wrote:The ideal time frame is to have a first version of the integration with Audacity by the end of April. Further improvements can get scheduled for later. What's the expected release date for version 2.0?

I think we're hoping for 2.0 by the Summer, as a broad generalisation. To achieve that we have to work at it.



Gale

OK. Good luck with version 2.0. So far we are going to try an in-house solution. If any developer in the team gets released and is interested in this collaboration, please, contact me: ed_dot_fuentetaja_at_gmail_dot_com.

I'll post in this thread again if there are any news from my side.

Kind regards,

Ed