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It's a grey area. There are quite a few open source audio apps that ship with ASIO support, some of them even GPL licensed. AFAICT, the problem is that Steinberg forbids redistribution of the SDK which would conflict with the GPL. Now, if you would get a license agreement from Steinberg and just don't include the SDK in your source code (to comply with Steinberg's terms), who is going to sue you for not complying with the GPL?

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Once upon a time, Google copied the Java APIs. Oracle sued Google. Google won.

We now have precedent. What's stopping someone from copying the ASIO APIs and shipping a compatible SDK?

Yes! In the end, ASIO is just a COM interface ("iasiodrv.h") + some structs, constants and typedefs in "asio.h". All the actual code in the .c files are just helpers. I definitely think it would be possible to take just the specifications and build an alternative SDK as long as you avoid the ASIO trademark. So far, nobody dared to do that, though. At least, I'm not aware of anything.

On the other hand, people did do that with the VST2 SDK a while ago. I'm pretty sure Steinberg knows about it but they probably don't want to risk a court case (which could set a clear precedent) and the bad publicity.

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