Yeah, Steinberg did well with the initial VST versions because it was "good enough", and because it was just open enough of a standard to draw developer support back when softsynths were a new frontier... However, it still requires you to sign an agreement and register a developer account with Steinberg, and there are limits on how you may license your derivative works (especially that you can't open-source your works that use VST), which means that Steinberg still basically owns you, you are not free to do whatever you want with it...hibidy wrote:In theory, you are completely correct, but I believe (though I don't know all the dirty little details) that steiny has something to do with why vst3 hasn't caught on as strongly as was once hoped.
VST3 was a fairly dramatic departure from previous VST versions that implements things other hosts had already implemented on their own to work-around limitations in those previous versions... So, it is somewhat non-trivial to implement proper VST3 support, and frankly, most people could already accomplish everything they wanted to with VST2.x, so there's not that much value in VST3...
But these days, most developers are smart enough to realize that any software standard should have a liberal open source license (BSD, MIT, LGPL, etc...), that allows them to do whatever they want and freely redistribute and make derivative works under a license of their choosing, even if software implementing the standards is going to be closed-source and proprietary. Developers don't want to be beholden to Steinberg, but there is no suitable open plugin format yet (please don't say LV2, LOL). I think Justin is smart enough to give his plugin format a proper open source license when/if it comes, but in the meantime, I expect VST2.x to continue to dominate, unless somebody else comes up with a proper plugin format...
