[linux-audio-dev] fst, VST 2.0, kontakt

[Thomas Vecchione]

Hmm you may be right if it is kept in a purely binary form, any use with 
open source technology with the GPL though would require it not be 
distributed as per this section of the licensing terms...


-------------------
The Licensee has no permission to sell, licence, give-away and/or 
distribute the VST PlugIn Interface technology or parts of it in anyway, 
on any medium, including the Internet, to any other person, including 
sub-licensors of the Licensee or companies where the Licensee has any 
involvement. This includes re-working this specification, or 
reverse-engineering any products based upon this specification.
-------------------

As such it would not be able to be transfered with Lash on which FST 
depends according to its webpage.  So to distribute a binary version of 
FST would violate the GPL license on Lash as well.

The thing about changing a license on open source projects is the fact 
that many developers submit their code under the GPL if the project is 
licensed under  the GPL.  As such in order to change it you have to get 
permission from all of those developers to use their code with a 
different license.

At least that is my understanding of all of this.  As such if all 
projects involved were licensed under the LGPL and the work was released 
as a pre-compiled lib to link to I THINK(Key word) it would be legal. 
Getting to that point however is extraordinarily difficult though.  Add 
on top of that though it would have to be statically linked to prevent 
api breakage on other projects like Wine(Which is LGPL I believe) and 
each version of wine tends to run plugins through FST to varying degrees 
of success, resulting in many people using very specific versions of 
wine to compile fst with, not just the most recent, as I am sure you are 
aware from previous posts you have made.

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