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retained in a new NOTICE file rather than superseded.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
mikkeli
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