DSP and Plugin Development • Re: Selling VST2 after October 2018: Steinberg agreement

reverse engineering the VST2 SDK (partially or fully) is NOT allowed by the current Steinberg VST2 license agreement.

I didn't check out my contract if such a passage exists at all. But in the end it would just mean that you should not have signed a VST2 license agreement before you reverse engineer it. Otherwise your license can get invalid.
VST2 is a plugin format from a German company (Steinberg). In Germany there does not and never existed somehing like 'software patents'. VST2 is just an interface. Not even the idea for audio plugins was new back in the days. DLL files are a basic functionality of Windows and DX plugins and other plugin formats existed before VST. According to various court decisions it is legit to write software for an interface by reverse enginerring it (see SAP, Oracle et al).

Well, obviously they changed their mind. And their terms.

Luckily you only can change the terms of a signed contract with the written agreement of both parties.

There whould have been an easy solution for their debacle a decade ago:
Provide a slim and properly working SDK with a documentation and full Midi support

Statistics: Posted by Tone2 Synthesizers — Tue Mar 05, 2024 7:14 am

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