The Steinberg VST3 SDK is dual-licensed under a proprietary license or GPLv3, at the user’s choice (https://developer.steinberg.help/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9797944). So far, so good. There are some files in the tarball that are not dual-licensed (https://developer.steinberg.help/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9797948), and these would need to be removed to create a redistributable version of the source archive—again, a common and well-documented situation.
However, there is another wrinkle. Steinberg imposes a long list of trademark-related “usage guidelines” (https://developer.steinberg.help/display/VST/Steinberg+VST+usage+guidelines) on all uses, including those under the GPLv3 license option.
I fear these additional terms may make the VST3 SDK unsuitable for packaging in Fedora. If so, the subset of the VST3 SDK bundled in the giada package (which I recently started maintaining) may need to be removed as well. However, I would appreciate input from this list before proceeding in either direction—either removing the bundled SDK (hopefully doing so in %prep would be sufficient) and disabling the associated optional functionality in Giada, or attempting to unbundle the SDK as a separate Fedora package.
Regards, Ben Beasley
On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 6:37 PM Benjamin Beasley code@musicinmybrain.net wrote:
I fear these additional terms may make the VST3 SDK unsuitable for packaging in Fedora.
Agreed. "or when the SDK is included" stands out to me as a problem, even though it isn't included on our install media.
It reminds me of several licenses on the "Bad license list", rejected for their "badgeware" requirements: Zimbra Public License 1.3 (section 3.2): https://www.zimbra.com/license/zimbra-public-license-1-3.html Terracotta Public License 1.0 (section 14): http://svn.terracotta.org/svn/ehcache/tags/ehcache-2.9.0/distribution/src/ma...
If so, the subset of the VST3 SDK bundled in the giada package (which I recently started maintaining) may need to be removed as well. However, I would appreciate input from this list before proceeding in either direction—either removing the bundled SDK (hopefully doing so in %prep would be sufficient)
You should remove it from the package sources before uploading it to the lookaside cache. Download the source from upstream, remove the unshippable parts, and then create a new tarball that is used in the spec file. For example, this is what openssl does: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/openssl/blob/rawhide/f/openssl.spec#_27
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Ben Cotton -
Benjamin Beasley