22 Jun
2010
22 Jun
'10
10:32 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Victor Lazzarini
<Victor.Lazzarini(a)nuim.ie> wrote:
Then there is the situation where you write a plugin
using VST (and its
non-free license) and GPL. GPL should 'contaminate' the plugin making it
Free, but then Steinberg will come back at you for breaking its license.
Surely if you use GPL code, then you need to publish your header files too.
Sorry, I did not mean to make this discussion longer than it needs to be,
but...
I think that situation is simpler, and is just as you surmise -- you
can't redistribute a plugin that claims to be under the GPL if it uses
the VST SDK headers.
There _are_ some VST plugins out there that use the SDK but claim to
be under the GPL, and I think that is really borne of frustration with
the current impossibility of "doing it properly" because of the
restrictive license for the SDK headers (most painfully, the SDK
license's reverse-engineering clause effectively forbids publishing
source for a plugin that _doesn't_ use the SDK, if you have already
accepted the SDK license).
So I expect the view is that, so long as nobody with a stake in the
software objects to it, then at least the license has described what
the plugin's author would like to happen in an ideal world. It's a
grey-market situation. You wouldn't be able to include such a plugin
in a typical Linux distribution.
Chris