Hi,
I completly understand, that because of the License of the VST-SDK it is not allowed, to distribute the SDK’s source code with ardour, so anyone who wants to enable VST-support for ardour has to download the SDK himself and activate it.
What I don’t understand: What licence forbids it to build a arour binary with VST-Support and distribute this binary? Can anyone explain?
As per the GPL you can not distribute the binary only. You have to, upon request, distribute the source to that binary as well and the Steinberger license doesn’t allow you to re-distribute their headers.
However, since 2.8 Ardour uses the reverse-engineered vestige headers so this problem is now bypassed (http://ardour.org/node/2555).