I’m pretty sure I signed something years ago to get the VST sdk, but I cannot remember absolutely. Does anyone know if there is any way to verify this other then emailing Steinberg and asking them to check?
As far as I recall, you have never needed to sign anything beforehand to download at least the VST and ASIO SDKs. The license paper is in the SDK files to fill in and send for them. They will then send you back a version with their signature on it.
Its possible I never signed, but its possible I did. I recall doing something about this like 20 years ago, vaguely.
My memory served me the same, but when checking I found out that I must have just clicked an electronic “I agree”, which is unfortunately not the same as the paper one, and is not considered binding for Steinberd as I understand it (IANAL).
Its really unfortunate Steinberg has taken this stance. I don’t mind if they don’t give out licenses to develop VST2 plugins anymore, but a host fundamentally still needs to be able to support hosting VST2 plugins at this stage of the game. They are cutting people off at the knees. They should allow hosting or have something built into the VST3 sdk to handle hosting of VST2 plugins automatically like a wrapper built in or something.
After 10 years of some bigger players not adopting the updated standard, they decided to strongarm the industry. Now that this finally happened, it would be lovely, if they could soften up, because it’s the independent developers who suffer. But I don’t think anything will change, we just wait another 10 years and the problem goes away…
Just my personal opinion…
maybe in ten years. What is unfortunate is that under this policy, older plugins that were made on VST2 and will not ever make it to VST3, cannot be used at all in a new host from a new developer. Older developers can keep supporting them and will do so, but new developers are completely unable to make a host that is needed by most users…with the continued ability to keep hosting VST2 plugins in addition to VST3 plugins.
I would be ok if Steinberg had said, no more new VST2 plugins licenses. That makes complete sense. And we are almost to the point where most hosts can support VST3 plugins now so great! But still there are literally thousands of VST2 plugins out there, many of which will never be supported for further development or moved to VST3…and they can only be hosted on older hosts from people that had the old license. any new host will not be able to host them, rendering that host practically useless in this day and age.
Steinberg needs a much longer crossover period for the ability to continue hosting VST2 plugins, even if they crack down on trying to force new developers to make new plugins as VST3. Fine. Its very short sighted of them. Some of those VST2 plugins will never make it to VST3 format…not even in ten years.
Even Cubase itself can still host VST2 plugins!
They should let new developers do so also. Very lame. In some places of that world that would start to fall under anti-trust violation.
Its really unfortunate Steinberg has taken this stance. I don’t mind if they don’t give out licenses to develop VST2 plugins anymore, but a host fundamentally still needs to be able to support hosting VST2 plugins at this stage of the game. They are cutting people off at the knees.
I totally agree with you. I wonder if a petition would do any good? Likely would not get enough signatures… 9 people from JUCE forums… 
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I totally agree with the above. For plugin developers, there is a way forward now that all big hosts support VST3 (one of the Steinberg guys at ADC told me Reason is coming onboard too before long). But host developers who didn’t sign the VST2 agreement are royally screwed.
I actually feel fairly certain that refusing to grant VST2 licenses to host developers violates EU antitrust laws. Article 102 of the TEFU states that a company within the union may not abuse a dominant position in the market to distort competition… which in my view is exactly what is happening here.
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Playing devil’s advocate:
- Steinberg does not predominantly sell plugins, in fact they don’t sell plugins at all, just bundle a basic set. Hence they are not distorting competition
- on a moral basis they could claim, that there was always an alternative, and VST was set to be replaced by VST3 a long ago
- on a psychological level revoking something already granted (even just by customary right) always leaves a bigger impact than the things they contributed. Without Steinberg there wouldn’t be VST at all, that allowed a whole industry to grow around it
In my eyes it all leads into a stupid blame game, where everybody loses:
- Steinberg lost street credibility (at least among developers)
- plugin developers lost the ability to serve the whole market
- abstractions like JUCE and iPlug2 have yet another format to implement
Surely I think most people agree, that such a technology would be best handled by a consortium, so that it cannot be abused.
How about creating an API as common effort? Ableton? JUCE? Reason?
Maybe if Steinberg contributes, it doesn’t even need to deprecate VST3, but would give the safety when using it, that it outlives the individual members and isn’t used as the wrench to force people.
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A fair standing on their part would be for new products/companies to allow hosting VST2 plug-in as long as VST3 is also supported. In other words: no new VST2-only hosts, but ok to those that support it for legacy reasons.
That being said, I would be very very surprised if they initiated legal action against an independent company solely on the ground of having provided support to VST2 plug-ins for legacy reasons.
However, I understand how much of a risk that represents…
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However a large part of their business is selling a DAW, and this is a big issue now for any new player trying to compete in that space: they cannot support hosting VST2 plugins, putting them at a huge disadvantage. I 100% agree with @rasmus on this point, they’ve abused their dominant position in the market to distort competition, perhaps unintentionally, but that is the effect.
Whether Steinberg likes it or not, VST2 is a de facto industry standard and since they control it, they are in a dominant market position.
Refusing to award new VST2 SDK licenses severly limits the possibilities for new players in the market for audio HOST software (but perhaps NOT plugins), putting exitsting players (of which Steinberg is a major one) at a significant advantage and new entrants at a significant disadvantage.
I’m no expert in EU law (or any law for that matter) but it looks like a textbook example of abuse and competitive distortion to me.
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Me too, and I certainly thought about just doing it without a license. I have a hard time believing that Steinberg is deliberately trying to screw over small developers that are trying to enter the market.
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I’m a fairly new plugin developer and I also missed the October deadline. But I do want to share VST binaries that people can use (my projects are under GPL). So I guess my options are:
1/ Publish binaries as VST3 and lose 70% of potential users
2/ Go rogue and publish VST2 anyway
Is that correct or is there a solution that I didn’t think about (like using an older SDK version or something of the sort)?
@GuillaumeE welcome to the Juce forum!
If I understand correctly, you are asking if there is a (legal) way for you to publish a closed source VST2 plugin without a signed VST2 SDK agreement?
I’m afraid the answer is no. But I think you may be able to ask another developer (that has the necessary licenses) to publish a very simple VST2 wrapper for your VST3 plugin and license it to your users.
The wrapper would function both as a VST2 plugin and as a VST3 host, and the interaction with your plugin would work as any other VST3 plugin/host interaction.
However, the developer of the wrapper would have to license this plugin directly to your end users. That’s not to say that you couldn’t distribute his plugin with your installer, as long as the user accepts a separate agreement from wrapper developer for this partuicular component.
Or at least that’s how understand it. Be careful about taking legal advice from random strangers on internet forums 
Another option: Make people build the vst2 version themselves from the GPL’ed sources. They’d have to grab the vst2 sdk themselves from somewhere and make sure they have the right to use it. You could write a nice guide on how to build the vst2 version. Maybe people would then realize they don’t need it when they can just use the vst3 instead…
What makes you think you lose 70% of customers when not providing a vst2 build? Most hosts now do support vst3.
If your plugins are GPL, I would use the FST headers…
Cannot be emphasized enough! It is valuable to form an opinion, but doesn’t always reflect the reality. Many things you can only find out once they went wrong.
I also think that number is a huge exaggeration, however, it is true that just because some hosts have just caught up adding VST3, doesn’t mean all their users did update…