VST-SDK now with Open Source license

3 Likes

It sounds very promising. I don’t understand the last sentence in the press release:

The VST 3.8.0 SDK is available from the Steinberg Developer Portal at
www.steinberg.net/developers/vstsdk/ under the existing licensing terms.

Specifically what ā€œexistingā€ means. Hopefully it’s just a semantic-grammar issue, although I think it is some needless ambiguity regarding what license applies.

It just means that their SDK has different licensing terms than the VST standard.

1 Like

Sure! Not all VSTs are now open source.

But the old license was not open so there were problems of using it in hosts or plugins for open source projects.

With the new license model there is a chance that x86/amd64 plugins may also be build for aarch64 - for free but also commercial projects.

I just changed the title of this thread to clarify this…

2 Likes

I think this is great news!

ā€˜Steinberg VST technology is open source and available under the MIT License’

this should open up the way for VST plugins to come to linux, no?

This is just really badly reported because the SDK was already open source. The VST3 SDK was previously dual-licensed under the Steinberg proprietary licence and the GPL3. This meant that if you wanted to develop a proprietary plugin you needed to use the SDK under the proprietary licence. If you wanted to make an open source plugin then it needed to be licensed under the GPL3.

The change to the MIT licence means that both commercial and open source development can happen under the same license. I’m actually annoyed at the implication that the GPL3 isn’t an open source license.

Both the VST2 and VST3 SDK’s have been available on linux, The issue with the VST2 SDK is that it was not redistributable, so plugin developers cannot just install it as a package, they have to get it from Steinberg.

I guess what is interesting is that VST3 is now licensed the same as CLAP.

There is not sufficient reason to move from LV2, but that may change in the future.

3 Likes