-The client libraries are licensed under LGPL
-The daemon itself and all plugings are licensed under GPL
+All PulseAudio source files are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
+License. (see file LGPL for details)
-Lennart Poettering, 2004
+However, the server side has optional GPL dependencies. These include the
+libsamplerate and gdbm (core libraries), LIRC (lirc module), FFTW (equalizer
+module) and bluez (bluetooth proximity helper program) libraries, although
+others may also be included in the future. If PulseAudio is compiled with these
+optional components, this effectively downgrades the license of the server part
+to GPL (see the file GPL for details), exercising section 3 of the LGPL. In
+such circumstances, you should treat the client library (libpulse) of PulseAudio
+as being LGPL licensed and the server part (libpulsecore) as being GPL licensed.
+Since the PulseAudio daemon, tests, various utilities/helpers and the modules
+link to libpulsecore and/or the afore mentioned optional GPL dependencies they
+are of course also GPL licensed also in this scenario.
+
+Andre Adrian's echo cancellation implementation is licensed under a less
+restrictive license - see src/modules/echo-cancel/adrian-license.txt for
+details.
+
+Some other files pulled into PA source (i.e. reference implementations that are
+considered too small and stable to be considered as an external library) use the
+more permissive MIT license. This include the device reservation DBus protocol
+and realtime kit implementations.
+
+Additionally, a more permissive Sun license is used for code that performs
+u-law, A-law and linear PCM conversions.
+
+While we attempt to provide a summary here, it is the ultimate responsibility of
+the packager to ensure the components they use in their build of PulseAudio
+meets their license requirements.