add plugin clarification to COPYING

This text was already in the About dialog, but should be here
too.
This commit is contained in:
Paul Davis 2023-04-26 13:28:24 -06:00
parent 4b77ecbe83
commit 261ba186cd
1 changed files with 22 additions and 0 deletions

22
COPYING
View File

@ -6,6 +6,28 @@
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Plugin Clarification
The following states the Ardour developers understanding of the
relationship between Ardour's license (GPL v2.0 or later) and plugins.
For the purposes of this understanding, "plugins" refer to software
dynamically loaded by another program, where the interaction between the
plugin and the loading program (typically called "the host") is defined by
a 3rd party API. Such APIs include (but are not limited to) VST,
AudioUnits, LV2, LADSPA and CLAP.
Since (a) any such plugin may be loaded by any host that supports the API
and (b) any host may load any plugin that supports the API, we consider it
self-evident that there can be no "derivative" relationship (in the sense
of the GPL's use of this term) between the host and plugin.
Consequently, Ardour may load arbitrarily licensed plugins, so as to cause
interactions between Ardour and the plugin via a 3rd party API, without any
implications for either Ardour or the plugin. In our understanding, Using
such plugins with Ardour is not impacted in any way by Ardour's GPL licensing.
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your