Yes, I’ve also seen the long list of feature requests left behind for years and still not even taken into account.
I’m disappointed. Well, it’s just my feeling. I feel I’m going to pay $120/y for nothing. Indie should stay at $40 at least for another major version.
Sorry, but I think this needs further clarification. Imagine reFX sends a text file to a contractor with all English strings, and the contractor returns, e.g., the Spanish version back to us to be included in our product. Now you expect us to pay a perpetual license for that contractor?
The same goes for graphics. Julian is not our employee. He’s an independent contractor working for dozens of clients. He made icons, designed layouts, etc., all inside Figma. We export individual icons as SVG, but the layout we implement ourselves, etc. Now, does reFX need to purchase another perpetual license for an external graphics designer?
Let’s say we hire 13 people to create our factory content (presets + samples). Do we now need an additional 13 seats?
I also feel that this needs to be clarified. I’m totally fine with a reasonable 10-20% price upgrade for the license, but there are some scenarios where the new licenses will yield a 500% - 1000% license cost increase and that is absolutely not OK and bordering on profiteering.
Say I’m working in a team for a project where I’m the sole C++ developer. I’m writing the code, the product designer builds and tests the plugins too and we hire an agency where 2-3 people work on the UI design with Figma and then we have a collaborations with 5-8 sound designers who write presets for the plugin.
Instead of two licenses (for me and the product designer) of JUCE 7 we would now need to acquire 13 licenses so instead of 5200$ before for two perpetual pro licenses we now total at 45k for the JUCE licenses. Am I missing something obvious?
JUCE is now too expensive for a hobbyist.
Can we get clarification…
I have a Perpetual license.
I work as a contractor for Company who have their own team of developers
Company has seats for all of their internal developers
Does Company have to purchase an additional seat for me as an external contractor who already has a perpetual seat?
Thanks,
Rail
Yes
Which means, JUCE is collecting money twice for every contractor.
Contractors will not need their own licences too, they can use the one required by their client.
If we had explicit exclusions from the licensing terms for image and audio files, would that address the issues raised here?
It’s not clear how to separate out “presets” from other more fundamental configuration files.
I have often contracts that are just one day a week because of budget constraints. I only give advice but of course I have to build the code myself to investigate.
This arrangement means my working will put 5 times the money into juces chest.
I think this prevents me from working on juce projects any more.
I am not a lawyer so I don’t know how you need to change the EULA. All that I can say is that if we need to pay 10x the amount for the JUCE licenses then we will not do so and find another way going forward.
Presets, audio files and graphics should definitely be excluded from the list of things that require a JUCE license. And for the issue with the double license that @daniel was talking about I think a solution for existing license holders would be fair and then new license agreements can be tied to the company that sells the product.
I think this is gonna be a major issue with the cost for my (many) clients who may use multiple contractors on multiple projects (graphics artists, dsp developers, JUCE developers, PACE developers, etc) in addition to their internal development teams.
Rail
I currently am a contractor for 3 companies, so now each of companies that employ me will each need to buy a license to cover my work. That’s a huge price increase.
Basically it is a deal breaker. I won’t upgrade to juce 8 under those terms
Need another clarification. What if company around ~100 people (including HR, sound designers etc.) has DAW which doesn’t use Juce with ability to host VSTs.
2 developers start building VSTs using Juce which are packaged with their DAW. How many JUCE 8 licenses are now required? 2 or 100? Taking in account that everybody contributes something to building main product DAW.
Yeah, I’m thinking to buy a perpetual JUCE 7 license (thus fixing my terrible licensing miscomprehension regards providing binaries to clients) and switch to iPlug + WebView. This is all starting to feel a bit like the Unity saga from last year.
We already have a provision in the EULA to deal with situations like that:
1.7.
…In the event the software development team using the Framework can be shown to be a small fraction of the overall software development team, and the use of the Framework is not important to the overall Product, then we may, at our sole discretion, allow a Product to be licensed using fewer seats than would otherwise be required by this Agreement. If your use of JUCE meets these conditions, please contact sales@juce.com to discuss an alternative licensing arrangement.
One way of determining how important the use of the framework is to the product, is to ask what the value of the product would be if JUCE was removed. A good real-world example is that JUCE is used for a few effects in a game engine. If we removed JUCE then those effects wouldn’t work, but the value of the game engine in that case is not substantially diminished, so we don’t require all of the hundreds of developers involved with the game engine to have licence seats.
If you can make a similar argument that your use of JUCE is not important to a product then we can discuss an alternative licensing arrangement.
The cost of an Indie licence has risen almost exactly in line with inflation in the UK since we last raised prices in April 2020. We have not made it more expensive in real terms.
Requiring a license for preset makers/GUI designers is just absolute madness and will essentially make most plugin companies go out of business (we have 20-30 artists making presets or content for each plugin, I’m sure most plugin companies are similar).
