Third-party licenses

June 23, 2026 · View on GitHub

transcribe.cpp is MIT-licensed (see LICENSE). It vendors and links the third-party components below, each under its own permissive license. The authoritative license text for each ships in-tree at the path noted; copies are reproduced here for convenience.

ComponentLicenseVendored atPin
ggmlMITggml/LICENSEsee ggml/UPSTREAM
minizMITsrc/third_party/miniz/LICENSEsee src/third_party/miniz/UPSTREAM

Prebuilt artifacts (the Swift xcframework, the native Python wheels, and the npm platform packages) carry these same texts alongside the binaries — see each binding's packaging for the bundled LICENSE.ggml / LICENSE.miniz files.


ggml

The tensor library underlying transcribe.cpp. Vendored under ggml/.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2023-2026 The ggml authors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

miniz

A single-file deflate/inflate (zlib-subset) codec. transcribe.cpp uses it only for Whisper's temperature-fallback compression-ratio heuristic; it replaces the previous system-zlib dependency. Vendored under src/third_party/miniz/.

miniz is MIT-licensed. (The comment block at the top of the amalgamated miniz.c / miniz.h still reads "public domain" — a stale artifact from the project's pre-relicensing history; upstream's current and authoritative license is the MIT text below, also shipped at src/third_party/miniz/LICENSE.)

Copyright 2013-2014 RAD Game Tools and Valve Software
Copyright 2010-2014 Rich Geldreich and Tenacious Software LLC

All Rights Reserved.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.