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FigBug / Organ

GNU General Public License v3.0
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VST2 SDK license violation #1

Open falkTX opened 2 years ago

falkTX commented 2 years ago

This plugin includes https://github.com/TurnipHat/plugin_sdk/tree/bcbef199f4dd78b883aebd6477cc104dad850e1b as a submodule Looking at that repo commits, it seems intentionally setup to obfuscate the VST2 SDK files. The whole account https://github.com/TurnipHat seems to be setup for that.

This is a clear license violation of VST2 SDK license, and worse this seems to be done on purpose. Can we please not do that?

bryc commented 2 years ago

"Can you please not support VST2 because it violates the rights of greedy tyrants who want you to only use VST3?"

How about no? Spineborg trying to prevent people from using VST2 is evil, and completely cruel. One could argue that supporting VST2 at all, without a grandfathered license, is a 'violation'. Even 'clean room' drop-in replacements exist in a grey area and can easily be contested by a bad-acting litigator. One can omit the headers, and leave obtaining them as an exercise to the user, but then is providing VST2 builds alone a violation? When will the tyranny end? I support anyone who defies the decision to discontinue VST2 because in most cases it is still the superior system. In fact, it is inherently immoral to profit from a monopolized, proprietary standard, and I cannot imagine defending such tyrants or even paying license fees for non-commercial work had the option still been available.

falkTX commented 2 years ago

We can be as upset as we want, but this is still a completely valid and legal issue that exists. If we do not respect other's peoples licenses, they have no reason to respect ours. I find this quite important when it comes to GPL.

And there is another way around this anyhow. JUCE used to have its own, GPL licensed, VST2 interface header file. We can simply use that, although it gives us more work to maintain a fork, but still quite doable. The code was GPL, so it will remain GPL.

https://github.com/DISTRHO/JUCE/commit/21428c0edc31464137f600dbb70750906c11c854 https://github.com/DISTRHO/JUCE/commit/800b42e9258b1451d4dd65b2557e44a606fe352c