Ctrlr Licence

[m.tarenskeen]

I read somewhere about Ctrlr dual GPL/BSD licencing.
I am not very good in understanding legal issues. Maybe someone who knows what he is talking about can explain to a simple Ctrlr user and musician what this means for us. For example: If I develop and publish a new Ctrlr Panel do I automatically agree with the Ctrlr licences and do these licenses also automatically apply to the Panel I have published?

[atom]

No. It means that you can use Ctrlr code in two ways.

One is a GPL licence that means if you want to use Ctrlr’s code you must include it with your product. The other licence means that you can do whatever you want with the code, you don’t need to publish the source code, you just need to mention where did the code come from.

Panels are not covered by this license, you can do whatever you want with them, sell them, give them away whatever, noone else has the rights to them, they are your intelectual property.

[m.tarenskeen]

OK, I see.

One thing I don’t understand: How can Ctrlr use two different Licenses simultaneously? It seems to me that the GPL and BSD licences are not compatible.
If I can freely choose to agree with only the BSD licence this makes the GPL licence useless.
Or am I misunderstanding something?

[m.tarenskeen]

And I have more questions around Licences. I see Steinberg VST sdk2.x public source code is part of the distribution. I think the Steinberg Licence does not allow this:

I quote from Steinberg VST PlugIns SDK Licensing Agreement, version 2.4:

2. The Licensee has no permission to sell, licence, give-away and/or distribute the VST PlugIn Interface technology or parts of it in anyway, on any medium, including the Internet, to any other person, including sub-licensors of the Licensee or companies where the Licensee has any involvement. This includes re-working this specification, or reverse-engineering any products based upon this specification.

If the Ctrlr code will be distributed without the Steinberg vst sdk components, it can also not be distributed under the GPL licence anymore. And it would be rather unfriendly to people who want to compile their own Ctrlr binaries.

The conflict between GPL and Steinberg licences is a known problem and probably the reason why the main Linux distributions don’t support VST technology by default. Even free software like Ctrlr and many free VST plugins are not and cannot be part of the distribution’s download repositories.

[atom]

I know i can’t distribute the vst sdk, but i don’t care, if steinberg wants to go after me, let them.

In terms of dual licensing, this is a common thing. You pick what license you want to use and you stick to it. You must remember that there is JUCE< boost and lua inside and those have their own licenses, you need to deal with those too.

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