Your prompt made me read through the EULA again, and there is no unambiguous communication from us when you upgrade a perpetual licence that your existing agreement is terminated. So it remains in effect.
Subscriptions are automatically renewed at the end of each billing cycle, so there is no ambiguity there.
But it remains mute on if we buy a whole new license (not an upgrade)… it just says “this Agreement shall remain in effect in perpetuity for the version originally acquired” not taking into account that the version originally acquired is covered under a separate Agreement and not touched by this newer Agreement.
Rail
The JUCE 7 EULA:
8.1. Where you have purchased a JUCE perpetual licence, this Agreement shall remain in effect in perpetuity for the version originally acquired (and any New Features or Minor Updates acquired under that version) unless terminated by us in advance in accordance with this Agreement.
Upgrading to JUCE 8 is not a mechanism that will terminate a JUCE 7 perpetual licence “in accordance with this Agreement”, so it will remain in effect.
Sorry… the words "this Agreement " means that the JUCE 8 Agreement supersedes the existing JUCE perpetual license… hence changing the terms of the original license.
Rail
Don’t take my word for it, always better to have an official confirmation, but to my understanding if you are the owner of the product, and sell it to anyone that hasn’t a chance to contribute or modify it, script it or alter its logic in a significant way etc. (see the actual words in the EULA please, but you get the idea), then they don’t need a license.
Yes, to my understanding as well. I hope it is confirmed officially.
I understood it differently: in the post you mention, Tom was saying that the JUCE 8 agreement doesn’t terminate the license according to the terms of the JUCE 7 agreement (the “this agreement” words were taken from JUCE 7 EULA), and thus purchasing an upgrade to JUCE 8 doesn’t terminate a previous JUCE 7 license after all (still talking only about perpetual ones).
If you send an email to info@juce.com and we can determine that it’s trivial use of bindings then I’m confident we can work something out.
From the JUCE 8 Agreement:
the words “this Agreement” in “this Agreement shall remain in effect in perpetuity for the version originally acquired” means that this Agreement (JUCE 8) supersedes any prior version (JUCE 7) Agreement you may have with the Company… which means the income terms, etc for JUCE 7 change once you sign or accept the JUCE 8 Agreement.
EDIT: Re-reading Tom and your post, perhaps I misunderstand that Tom means they’ll just change this clause so that when upgrading the JUCE 7 terms and license remain intact (even for an upgrade)??
Rail
The statement (“That was already the case with previous versions of JUCE”) is unequivocally false. See the below previously posted 2017 exchange with jb1 who was IIRC the t0m equivalent at the time. At least as of JUCE 5, the official JUCE position was that a company that does not work with the code does not need a license even if their name was on the product. Requiring product owners to have a license is new to the proposed JUCE 8 EULA.
Under the most recent proposed terms, I understand it’s not strictly required for the product owner to have one license for himself because he owns a product made with JUCE.
In present terms, he needs to buy the licenses only for its employees to modify or contribute to it (similar to JUCE 7) or for any external contractors that do the same even if they have their own license (this is the new part introuduced with JUCE 8)
In practical terms, for the owner that develops products via contractors, it still translates to the obligation of being owner of licenses (in order to have the product developed), but that requirement shouldn’t be transmitted transitively down the distribution chain downhill from there, because from there on the product is just sold (but not modified or contributed to)
Where you have purchased[1] a perpetual Licence, this Agreement shall remain in effect…
I think it would be worth taking the most common and pertinent questions and scenarios people have raised and adding them to the FAQ, or some other new page related to the licence. That might be the best way of distilling the useful bits. You could then edit the original post with the new link to direct future readers.
Thanks for all the analysis people are doing.
What worries me most is that a cool github library like Juce just blindly becomes a corporate ‘enshittification’ device in the future. But that’s probably just me worrying too much.
That’s a worry for lots of us (equally to JUCE bankruptcy/abandoned).
But it appears that debate is possible here.
And that’s in favor of a cool github library than a corporate enshittification blah-blah.
To the credit of the JUCE team, I think it can be said that they reacted quickly to the negative feedback, and promptly proposed viable solutions regarding at least some of the main points of concern.
Some other corporate soulless entity would probably have simply published the new terms with immediate effect, then ignored the complaints unless they reflected on the bottom line at the end of the year.
Sure, it would have been better if a perfect EULA were published right away (and the current modifications still have at least the issue of contractors that will be covered in a thick layer of JUCE 8 licenses if every company that hires them for some hours needs to provide a license for them) but I wonder if the JUCE team expected us users to accept the initial terms of the 8 EULA reasonably well, because the composition of the community they had in mind happened to be significantly different from the real one that emerged in this discussion
How do you know that this all comes from, and is handled by the Juce team?
Juce is owned by a commercial American company.
Juce has always been a commercial company as far I know.
What do you mean with “cool Github”? That you can read the source code online?
It is on Github, and it’s one of the best frameworks I have ever used. That is all.
Whether people should be worried about the future of it, I have no idea.
I don’t know, what I have written is just my opinion, that’s why I specified “I think”, “probably” and “I wonder” in my post.
Thanks to your post I realized the meaning of that specific sentence can be misunderstood, I’ll edit it to reword it the way I originally meant it
