We are developing a video ingestion,live-stream, playback, and analytics service. We are planning to use gstreamer as a core component of our video encoding pipeline.
Our system will involve live streaming from various cameras, storing the video data (potentially on-premise or on cloud), and enabling features like video playback and advanced analytics.
We would greatly appreciate it if anyone could provide information on the following:
gstreamer Licensing:
What are the licensing terms and conditions for using gstreamer in our commercial video service?
Are there any specific restrictions or limitations related to our use case?
Obtaining a License:
How can we obtain the necessary licenses for commercial use of gstreamer in our code/product?
I think these are questions you should ask your company’s lawyers
Most of GStreamer is licensed under the LGPL v2.x or later license, but dependencies might be differently licensed.
GStreamer Rust plugins are mostly licensed under the MPL-2.0 license.
You should read the license to see what the conditions are. There is also a README.static-linking that might be interesting if you’re building iOS or Android applications.
You do not need to obtain a “commercial license” to use GStreamer in a commercial product or commercial application, it is absolutely fine to write proprietary commercial applications on top of GStreamer (whilst keeping the application source code proprietary) and to write custom proprietary GStreamer plugins, and there are thousands of companies doing that already.
Depending on what exactly you’re doing you may need to obtain patent licenses from third parties, but that has nothing to do with GStreamer and would be equally true if you used other open source multimedia libraries or components.
Most LGPL obligations only kick in if you distribute your application to third parties (i.e. not if you build a cloud service with it).
