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. Seablade

I was under the impression that Linux Sampler is undergoing license changes. Not sure where I picked that up. In any case, Linux Sampler and Kontakt are different sorts of samplers at this point. Linux Sampler is more in the spirit of Gigasampler, and Kontakt is more like an emulation of a hardware sampler (but vastly more flexible). Kontakt supports several built in effect types, and complex modultation of parameters. I don't understand Linux Sampler to support that, but instead, I believe Linux Sampler focuses on smoothly playing huge samples in order to achieve accurate imitations of real instruments. Am I incorrect? Assuming that kontakt is the only goal, yes. However, I do have other VSTs that I used extensively before dropping Windows altogether a few years ago. One tends to turn to the same tools over and over again to the point where they are almost essential. Every effect implementation is perhaps only slightly different, however, I've found that I became reliant on those subtleties. In any case, the VST spec itself is an open specification, even if the source is not freely re-distributable. I think it is a worthwhile goal to have full support for VST under Linux, not because it isn't worth the time to create free alternatives to current VSTs. Having good VST support will help bring a lot of musicians from other platforms. People rely on these things! Noted. However, I remain unconvinced that Linux Sampler is intended to be a drop-in replacement for something like Kontakt. I will look into it further. I played with LS a while back (actually, I packaged it for Ubuntu). Maybe I missed something. thanks, Forest