[Installation]: LGPL license in dependencies

[laurens-gs]

Your current environment

Since vLLM 0.5.5 there is a dependency on Librosa, which in turn depends on soxr. Soxr is LGPL licensed which is a big red flag for many corporations. I'm not a legal expert but I do understand that LGPL is more permissive than regular GPL or AGPL. However many large firms still consider it too risky and block any LGPL license by default and as a result I am now no longer able to install vLLM in my firm (Fortune 50 size).

I would kindly request to reconsider the use of Librosa.

[mgoin]

Perhaps we could move audio support to an "extra" optional dependency and instruct users to install using pip install vllm[audio] for that functionality, like the similar transformers[audio] extra
https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/b127fb8fdc33ff494a04ec91cccbf32d2c1add9c/setup.py#L300

[DarkLight1337]

I didn't consider licensing issues before, this is definitely a valid concern! @mgoin's solution sounds good to me.

cc @petersalas

[robertgshaw2-neuralmagic]

The optional dependency makes sense to me. I also filed an issue in librosa to see if they can remove soxr.

[petersalas]

FWIW I suspect we could also replace the usage of librosa with soundfile. I think there's one place in Ultravox we use librosa for resampling if necessary but we could make that conditional on librosa being present and/or fail if the sample rate is wrong.

[robertgshaw2-neuralmagic]

FWIW I suspect we could also replace the usage of librosa with soundfile. I think there's one place in Ultravox we use librosa for resampling if necessary but we could make that conditional on librosa being present and/or fail if the sample rate is wrong.

I think we should address this ASAP

[ywang96]

@laurens-gs we have made librosa an optional dependency of vLLM. Let us know if you have any other concern.

[laurens-gs]

@laurens-gs we have made librosa an optional dependency of vLLM. Let us know if you have any other concern.

This solution works great for me! Cannot test it until it hits PyPi, but I do not expect issues.

[youkaichao]

@laurens-gs you can test with the per-commit wheel. see https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/getting_started/installation.html :

vLLM also publishes a subset of wheels (Python 3.10, 3.11 with CUDA 12) for every commit since v0.5.3. You can download them with the following command: