[ARCHIVED] JUCE 8 EULA

[t0m]

@stenzel

Consider a scenario where a new client wants a plugin and I recommend Juce, can I start developing without a license and make him buy Juce after having convinced him?

You could probably begin work under the AGPLv3. As long as you were contracted first and the source code was the property of the client, then there is unlikely to be a “distribution” or “conveying” of closed source binaries outside of the organisation, which is when the open sourcing aspect of the AGPLv3 kicks in.

[ZioGuido]

@fuo

if compagnies resort to shady technics (script bindings and the like) to abuse your terms, what would prevent them to just blatantly ignore them altogether in the future in they feel like their model is not viable anymore? What is it that you are trying to achieve here?
How would you combat this?

It’s a bit like if a Country tried to completely ban the use of weapons, this wouldn’t stop criminals from continuing to do their job.

But that’s indeed a good point. We all know that our softwares will be pirated sooner or later, no EULA has ever stopped piracy. Trying to increase prices to cover losses due to piracy or applying further restrictions to the license would only penalize legit users, but would not stop piracy.

[kunitoki]

@t0m

UIs written in HTML/CSS/JS

That is a clever marketing move i haven’t thought about !

[t0m]

@lcapozzi

If I’ll get, let’s say, 3 seats, then I’m allowed to have 3 developers working concurrently. If I switch from a guy to another (without exceeding the number of concurrent seats), then I’m covered. Is that correct?

Yes. The wording in the EULA is:

You may reassign a Licence seat to another individual when the original assignee leaves the entity that owns the Licence, is moved to another project, or there is another permanent reason that changes the assignee’s requirement for a Licence. Any such assignment must not be undertaken so frequently as to enable the sharing of a Licence between multiple users.

If one developer has finished their employment/contract, then you can use that seat for a different developer.

@lcapozzi

but how would you profit if a company just need a single seat for JUCE (to build the final product) while having, let’s say, 20 HTML/CSS/JS programmers working at the same time? And there you go.

I’ll say it again: the motivation for the changes regarding content type is purely defensive, it is not a money grab. I understand that not everyone will believe me.

@lcapozzi

I never saw a policy like that in over 25 years working in IT.

The GPLv3 works in exactly this way. I recognise that open source licensing is a different animal, but the copyleft mechanism has a very long history.

[t0m]

@normalised

I know. You said that before, what i should make clear is that the contractor also makes their own product, which is why they have a Licence.

In your example company A would still require a licence seat for you, even if your own company had a licence seat you were using when working on your own projects.

[leehu]

A question about the mixing of licenses. If I have an indie license to cover my own developments and releases, and also do contract work for a client who is in the pro tier, do I have to upgrade or am I covered for his work under his pro license, and my own work under my indie license?

[dhng22]

The cost of an Indie licence has risen almost exactly in line with inflation in the UK

Understanable, that “UK inflation” thing also decrease “Annual Revenue or Funding Limit” by more than half with Indie license and also remove it for Personal license

[ZioGuido]

@lcapozzi

I have my own DSP framework which works without relying on any of JUCE’s classes, keeping it strictly under the standard library to ensure portability and have it future proof. In the rare cases I reach out to another developer for contract work, that’s what I ask. The code must be platform agnostic and work in the bounds of the standard library. I don’t see a reason why I should pay for an extra seat,

Same here. All our DSP code is completely Juce-free (we can also compile and run it on bare metal). Any non-Juce related code or other kinds of material should not be subject to Juce’s license.

[yfede]

Figure the following scenario:

JConsulting is a hypotetical firm whose job is to provide work especially on JUCE projects.
They don’t release any product, it is a contractor entity, thus they don’t need any JUCE license, correct?

CoolPlugins is a start-up manned by only two JUCE programmers, which have purchased their own JUCE seats for themselves.

At a certain point in time CoolPlugins needs some JUCE job done but its founders are too busy and they contact JConsulting to do the job.

Do the founders of CoolPlugins need to ask how many JConsulting programmers are working on the task that they contracted JConsulting for?

That not only seems impractical, I believe that overflows in “that’s none of your business” territory: JConsulting shouldn’t be required to disclose how many people are working on that task.

But nonetheless, that’s a requirement if CoolPlugins must pay for the JUCE seats of those developers

[t0m]

@audiothing

And that’s why WebView was pushed, even though CLAP is the number one FR, and iOS has been neglected for years.

No, we started working on WebViews because it adds more value. The sentiment about WebViews on the JUCE forum is a little confusing. When we speak to people outside of the forum almost everyone is really excited about WebViews. When we did the JUCE talk at the Audio Developer Conference I mentioned that Attila had done most of the WebView work and he was instantly surrounded. He captured the bulk of the audience. But anyway, I don’t want to start another thread about WebViews here - please move that discussion to the JUCE 8 preview branch thread.

@audiothing

However, with JUCE, I have to continue paying for every single small or large contribution a contractor makes to my code. This situation forces me to retain the same contractor to minimize costs, as hiring multiple contractors would mean each new one adds an annual fee of $2,100 or a one-time fee of $3,500 on top of their charges.

@audiothing

So, on that: I never hire more than one contractor on each project, if I purchase an extra seat, can my contractors use this during the year as long as there’s only one using it?

You are not forced to keep the same contractor. If their contract is over you can use that seat for a different contractor. I’ve linked the to corresponding section of the new EULA in a previous post.

@audiothing

And another question, if an artist is actively helping with the internal design/signal chain of a product, even though he’s not touching any code, do we need an extra license for that as well?

If their contribution is only in the form of one the types of content I’ve proposed would be excluded, then no.

[yfede]

@t0m

There are other ways of exploiting the existing licensing agreement that are much more damaging to JUCE as a business, and I don’t want to provide details on a public forum for obvious reasons

This seems kinda the point honestly: there is some malicious conduct that JUCE wants to avoid?

Explicitly state that in the license and make it illegal to use JUCE in those ways.

You don’t want to give ideas by stating those ways explicitly?

That’s security through obscurity AND through pissing off (sorry for the term, I’m not native speaker and nothing more polite comes to mind, feel free to suggest and I’ll edit) honest license holders by mean of what looks like an overly restrictive license.

As it has already been said, all the above while still likely NOT preventing those illegal conducts that you fear from happening anyway

[chrisboy2000]

@tom I get your frustration but like others said: the number 1 priority when dealing with bad actors that abuse your business model is to make sure that legit users are not harmed along the way.

As the author of the HISE framework that vaguely offers a similar workflow to the example that you keep posting as the pinnacle of criminal energy I have to say that this license changes is certain to oppose a risk to the business model to a few of my clients and vastly decreases the attractivtiy of my platform up to the point where I have to considered migrating away from JUCE (which will be 4-5 years of my life that I’m not getting back). We can come up with theoretical examples, but any licensing change that will end up with a license cost increase of 500%-1000% mid-flight is not something that can be accepted in any way.

If there is a single evil company threatening your entire business model with a shady binding workaround, then just don’t sell them a JUCE 8 license, free market and stuff. But there are quite a few companies that started using HISE back when it was perfectly fine to buy a single license and then have 3-4 developers working on scripting / DSP prototyping within a visual programming environment and UI design. Have they made that decision at the start of their business with questional moral motives? No, they read the license agreement, calculated the cost vs. estimated profit and decided to go down this route putting trust into both you and me for being fair framework providers for years to come. How are they threatening the business model of JUCE? They weren’t JUCE clients before because most of them used KONTAKT to ship script-powered sample libraries and now they are paying you money because they click on compile and let the command line compiler do their job.

Now is it a bargain to pay one indie license to ship a product where 3-4 people worked on? Yes, so increase it a bit and raise the threshold again to put them into the PRO tier but that was the deal at the beginning and the most important thing that you can have in a platform like JUCE is the trust that they won’t pull the rug from under your business operation and this trust is heavily violated here if you move forward with this license change. It’s also not only the actual price increase which might be hurtful but manageable in some cases, but the feeling that you are subject to license changes that will strongly affect your business model up to a point where you just need to call it a day and close down your business.

Now would this kind of arrangements fall under the excemption that you mentioned earlier where they can be made a custom arrangement for a limited amount of seats? Or at least offer some grace options for existing customers who want to move forward to JUCE 8 (because staying on JUCE 7 forever is not a real option for any self-respecting business).

[t0m]

@fuo

We also know that those illicit users would not have bought the product anyway.

Are you sure? This is going to veer off into an entirely separate conversation where everyone has really strong opinions, so I’m not keen to fire it up. I have been given a window into the insides of copy protection via PACE and seeing a company’s revenue drop by 40% when a crack is released is not a scare story, that really happens.

[fuo]

@t0m

No, we started working on WebViews because it adds more value. The sentiment about WebViews on the JUCE forum is a little confusing. When we speak to people outside of the forum almost everyone is really excited about WebViews.

Trying to appeal to new customers is probably a smart move, but ignoring your current customers (and their #1 FR) is certainly not. Different behavior for pre-sale vs after-sale support?

Beside, on one hand you are refusing to add an open source plugin format that is an effort to avoid monopolistic behavior (and we all know that without JUCE support this format is doomed), and in the other hand you are adding a feature that will nourish itself on the now viral behavior of your new license terms.
How are we supposed to read that?

[t0m]

@leehu

A question about the mixing of licenses. If I have an indie license to cover my own developments and releases, and also do contract work for a client who is in the pro tier, do I have to upgrade or am I covered for his work under his pro license, and my own work under my indie license?

This is a great example of where the JUCE 7 EULA gets confusing.

If you have a JUCE 7 Indie licence then you can:

• Develop your own software
• Develop software for a client who would be in the Pro tier themselves as long as the software you were developing for them had only contributions from contractors with Indie licences
• Use a Pro tier licence provided by your client

You have to upgrade if:

• You are using your Indie licence and the client’s project has any contribution from someone using a Pro licence

This might happen dynamically because someone, elsewhere, hit a revenue limit. Or a handful of other triggers. Your client is the one left holding the legal responsibility. This is a mess, and it’s one we have removed with JUCE 8.

[Qfactor]

I have an additional question. If a company decides to pay for 4 JUCE subscriptions to speed up the development of a product with 4 developers, is that company condemned to keep paying for the 4 subscriptions after the product is released even if only a single developer will be enough to maintain and update it? This would be in my opinion harmful for productivity because companies would never hire more than 1 developer to work on a product to keep the long term costs down.

[t0m]

The founders of CoolPlugins would need to determine how many additional JUCE licences seats are required.

[audiothing]

@t0m

When we speak to people outside of the forum almost everyone is really excited about WebViews.

Funny, when we speak to other developers outside of this forum, the sentiment is exactly the same, less than enthusiastic, to put it mildly. But don’t worry, I’ll stop here.

@t0m

You are not forced to keep the same contractor. If their contract is over you can use that seat for a different contractor. I’ve linked the to corresponding section of the new EULA in a previous post.

Well, there’s that, at least. Still, with JUCE 8, I’m essentially required to purchase at least two seats as a measure to prevent the equivalent of what we face daily: piracy. This is despite the fact that all my contractors already have licenses.

Fighting piracy by asking for more money from legitimate paying users. I wonder where this is coming from…

[t0m]

@Qfactor

I have an additional question. If a company decides to pay for 4 JUCE subscriptions to speed up the development of a product with 4 developers, is that company condemned to keep paying for the 4 subscriptions after the product is released even if only a single developer will be enough to maintain and update it? This would be in my opinion harmful for productivity because companies would never hire more than 1 developer to work on a product to keep the long term costs down.

That is correct, and has been the case for all previous versions of JUCE too.

[leehu]

So, what’s the answer for juce 8? I’m the only person working for him. His pro license overs my work for him, my indie license covers my own work?? Is that correct??