ASIO (was Re: [fluid-dev] Imminent 1.1.3 release?)

[David Henningsson]

On 2010-10-10 11:58, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> On Sunday 10 October 2010, Bernd Casper wrote:
> > > It is just important to remember not to link to anything
> > released under GPL at the same time that we link to ASIO.<
> >
> > Does that mean, a chain jOrgan (GPL) -->  FS (LGPL) -->  Jack -->  ASIO raises
> licensing problems, in your eyes?
>
> Absolutely.
>
> GPL and LGPL licenses require you to provide all the source code needed to
> rebuild the distributed binary library upon request from an user.
>
> Steinberg explicitly forbids you to distribute the source code of the ASIO
> SDK, (or the VST SDK) when you accept the online download conditions.
>
> If you distribute a binary product under a GPL/LGPL license linked to one of
> those Steinberg SDKs you are going to break one license.

Thanks for providing some background. If that's the main problem, as 
long as we don't bring in anything GPL somewhere in the linked 
libraries, it can be worked around:

1) Introduce a simple "ASIO glue library".
2) We link to this library instead of directly to the ASIO SDK.
3) This library could be BSD (or anything very permissive), which then 
fulfils the LGPL license as well as ASIO's restrictions.
4) The implementation of the same library links to the ASIO SDK headers
5) We distribute the binary to the glue library, but for recompilation 
people will have to download the ASIO SDK themselves.

Perhaps this is the way Jack has done it?

// David