Reading the comments of the Linux plugin developers who chimed in when this topic was new, I didn't get the impression that this was big news to them.Basslint wrote:Sorry for the huge bump people, two years.
But two years passed and almost nothing changed, while this should have been big news that could change audio on GNU/Linux forever.
First, Ardour did not implement VST3. This is possibly due to license incompatibility between Ardour (GPLv2+) and the VST3 SDK (GPLv3), which could be solved only if Ardour moved to GPLv3+.
Then, many major libre VST plugins were not ported from VST2, despite Steinberg really discouraging it (it also sends DMCAs to whom distributes it).
Are we as a community not going to do anything about it? Too bad, because this could be a huge opportunity to grow.
If I understand the situation correctly, Ardour will never move to GPLv3 as Mixbus would no longer be able to use Ardour's code due to the additional restrictions of that license. Harrison has done a lot to aid the Ardour project, and as far as I know, Steinberg has done nothing. Ardour wouldn't gain anything from changing their license to match the VST3 license and would instead lose a valuable partner, which makes no sense.
What do you expect the community to do? I personally see no connection between Steinberg changing the license of a bit of software and a huge opportunity for us to grow, but perhaps there is one. As far as I know, there was no pent up demand for Steinberg to do this. People weren't clamoring for it before it happened; it was somewhat of a surprise.
I think it is encouraging when we see software GPL'd, but we should measure our expectations. It still takes an incredible amount of effort for developers to do something with that code, and if the code that is open-sourced is not particularly useful to developers, we shouldn't expect much to come of it.