yupferris
commented
3 years ago Note that a (relatively) short path might be to use vestige, an apparently-clean-room-reverse-engineered VST 2 compatibility layer that’s been floating around for years now. It looks like it’d still require some glue to work with eg. VSTGUI but still is likely far better than repeating this work ourselves.
This is actually a big licensing mess. See the following comments for some of my notes:
I believe the best strategy for this, as outlined in the last comment above, is to migrate to VST 3 proper, still BYOSDK for developers, and sign the VST 3 proprietary agreement myself in order to ship binary builds on behalf of the project (at least covering the main repo; we might need to be very explicit that other folks couldn't distribute the same plugs under these terms). As far as I can tell, this avoids any legal grey-areas and allows us to be fully compliant with the license terms, but could actually be considered a breaking change, as it locks out older DAWs that don't support VST 3. One such DAW is Live 9, which we've used for years and currently have test projects for in the converter test suite. I'm not entirely sure if this matters tho; afaik most folks are on Live 10 or even 11 by now, but still (so this implies that #81 would have to be solved as well).
In any case, this would be extremely useful for non-coders to compose with WS (especially if we have plugins built on multiple platforms), whereas folks incorporating the synth into prods would still have to deal with source, which is perfectly reasonable IMO.