Carried back from Bari 206, where sixteen deferred hard errors had
accumulated unnoticed because nothing distinguished them from style
warnings in the build log.
Future-incompatibility warnings are rustc saying this code stops compiling
on some later release. Denying the group makes that a build failure the
day it appears rather than a surprise during an unrelated toolchain bump.
Every plugin cloned from this template inherits the guard.
Clippy and style lints stay warnings; only the future_incompatible group
is denied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
Apache-2.0 was the wrong declaration for two independent reasons.
Enabling the `vst3` feature links vst3-sys, which is GPLv3-or-later by its
own authors' choice — they describe their port as a derivative of
Steinberg's SDK that "was not made in isolation", so the obligation holds
regardless of any question about Steinberg's own rights. Gating the
feature kept the default build clean, but plugins built from this template
are intended to ship VST3, so GPL is where they land anyway. Declaring it
up front is more honest than deferring the decision to every clone.
Separately, parts of src/lib.rs derive from Robbert van der Helm's
NIH-plug cookiecutter template and its `gain` example, both ISC. ISC's one
condition is that its copyright and permission notice travel with all
copies, and this repo carried neither — a compliance gap that existed
regardless of the GPL question. ISC is GPL-compatible, so the notice is
retained in a new NOTICE file rather than superseded.
The `vst3` feature stays opt-in, but its rationale changes: it is no
longer about licence compliance, only about not pulling a sizeable
dependency into a CLAP-only build. The Cargo.toml comment said otherwise
and would have misled the next reader.
Also corrects the README's claim that you must "accept Steinberg's VST3
SDK licence". No SDK source is vendored or redistributed here, so there is
nothing to accept at build time. The real constraint is vst3-sys's GPLv3,
plus Steinberg's separate trademark in "VST" — a different regime from
copyright that no source licence resolves.
Copyright in the Irene <irene@novoyuuparosk.org> commits is held by the
repository owner (an agent identity), so no third-party agreement was
needed for this relicense.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
Cargo.toml declared Apache-2.0 while the default build linked vst3-sys,
whose bindings are GPLv3 — so the artifact a fresh clone produced could
not legally be distributed under the licence the repo claimed. A template
should not hand that trap to every project cloned from it.
NIH-plug already anticipates this: its `vst3` feature exists, in upstream's
own words, "mostly for GPL-compliance reasons". Taking `default-features =
false` and re-exporting `vst3` as a local opt-in makes the default build
CLAP-only and genuinely Apache-2.0 clean, while `--features vst3` remains
one flag away for anyone who accepts GPLv3.
Gating the feature rather than relicensing keeps the decision with whoever
uses the template. Reversing it is a one-line default plus removing two
cfg attributes, where relicensing to GPLv3 now would commit every
downstream plugin to that choice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
mikkeli
irene