mb-sound-jackffi VS pointgrey_camera_driver

Yeah, here's my main sound repo: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound

There's also an FFI wrapper for jackd: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound-jackffi

I'm certain there are still improvements that could be made to the APIs and to performance, so I'm not currently releasing these on rubygems.

Shared libraries and dynamic linking make writing FFI wrappers in other languages possible. If every library were statically linked, I wouldn't be able to write things like this: https://github.com/mike-bourgeous/mb-sound-jackffi

I dealt with a situation like this for a ROS driver for a camera, where the proprietary SO was redistributable, but the headers and the rest of the vendor's "SDK" was not. The vendor clarified for me repeatedly that it would not be acceptable for us to re-host the SDK, that it was only accessible from behind a login portal on their own site.

The solution we eventually came to was downloading the SDK on each build, using credentials baked into the downloader script:

https://github.com/ros-drivers/pointgrey_camera_driver/blob/...

The vendor was fine with this approach, and it didn't violate their TOU, though it sure did cause a bunch of pain for the maintainers of the public ROS CI infrastructure, as there were various random failures which would pop up as a consequence of this approach.

I think eventually the vendor must have relented, as the current version of the package actually does still download at build time, but at least it downloads from a local location— though if that is permissable, I don't know why the headers themselves aren't just included in the git repo.