That's can be a super hard line to draw as many hardware implementations are just firmware running on hardware with some specialized dsp instructions.

Sounds like they didn't have the balls to sue Microsoft. (Opus is SILK+CELT and SILK was developed by Skype, which was bought by MS)

So they claim. But they’re also explicitly including software in the scope of the pool itself.

I wonder if this could stifle (hardware) use of the RFC Opus over A2DP vendor codec that was slowly coming together on Pipewire.

(Which is kind of in the chicken-egg position where there's no hardware to receive it outside of other pipewire clients anyway.)

Edit: It's already merged and ready for use, and is the only thing that'll do multi-channel audio over bluetooth?

I'm hoping to add support for Opus to the upcoming PineBuds Pro, but no guarantees I'll be able to accomplish it at my current skill level. So far I couldn't even get the first SDK to compile (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro).

I would have thought that something like that would have been all offloaded to hardware or in a weird DSP assembly (Like how Qualcomm have their newer aptx codecs as Hexagon DSP code), but I see a LDAC decoder as a regular ARM object in there.

Good luck to you I guess.