7 Feb
2013
7 Feb
'13
2:55 p.m.
On 07/02/13 20:42, Paul Davis wrote:
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:20 AM, Simon
Wise<simonzwise(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/02/13 20:04, Paul Davis wrote:
i was in communication (both email and in person) with people at steinberg
in the early 2000's.
they had no particular antipathy to open source.
they had two problems:
(1) they did not want to see the VST spec diverge as a result of people
adding new features to the API
and distributing the result, and then over time more people
starting to use the extended version rather
than the one that steinberg controlled. hence: no redistribution
of the SDK.
(2) their lawyers. lots of people on this list under-estimate the
awareness that lawyers have for open
source issues. steinberg's (and later yamaha's too) simply didn't
really get the issues that open
source development had with their license terms, and as a result
were more than reluctant to modify
the license. in the end, inaction won out over action, as is
typically the case.
so the problem then was originally an unintended side effect of a different
policy. Then it was brought to their attention, at that time they considered it
seriously enough to consult their lawyers and make a serious response.
They actively decided not to change their policy and continued to refuse to
license FLOSS distribution of binaries for the next 10 years.
So a decade later it is no longer an oversight or mistake, it is now an active
"we don't care".
Simon