Did Pace buy the Juce Platform?

[cheshirecat]

Not sure how to interpret this

Pace Ilok has bought the Juce Platform :-( - Gearslutz

Is it true? Does this affect Juce in any way?

[HowardAntares]

I don’t see any ownership changes, but Allen Cronce and Andrew Kirk were just appointed Directors of Raw Material Software, Ltd., which operates JUCE, a couple of weeks ago.

[anthony-nicholls]

Interesting. I think this could be good a thing. It’s clear JUCE needed some financial funding so I suspect the sudden increase in work is no coincidence. For those wanting (or in the case of AAX needing) to incorporate PACE this could mean things in the future being more integrated? Maybe PACE will become an easier licensing option for those using JUCE in the future. The PACE protection especially with cloud licences now isn’t actually that bad it’s just there can be some hoops to jump as a developer. Obviously that’s all speculation.

[xenakios]

@anthony-nicholls

I think this could be good a thing.

Perhaps, but what might it do to the open source and less expensive commercial licenses in the future? What interest exactly would a secretive and money-grabbing company like Pace have in Juce in the first place? Let’s face it, Pace and iLok are not exactly names that are loved in the end user market. Many end users are merely willing to tolerate them, if there’s some product they absolutely need to be able to use.

[anthony-nicholls]

Perhaps, but what might it do to the open source and less expensive commercial licenses in the future?

Why couldn’t you say the same about ROLI they are both businesses that have to make money at the end of the day. If indeed PACE do now “own” JUCE then the recent licence changes should be of some comfort after all it’s the lower tier licences that have benefited and the open source licences have stay exactly as they are as far as I’m aware.

What interest exactly would a secretive and money-grabbing company like Pace have in Juce in the first place?

They are well and truly embedded in the plugin industry, I think there’s a lot more sense in it than you might think. I’ve had to implement PACE Fusion in plugins in the past and we were managing custom versions of JUCE largely for this reason. So I could see them having tighter integration. Hopefully making it easier for developers to use PACE security if they wish. Ultimately this would you hope lead to more potential customers. Not to mention that managed properly it can act as an income. Basically many JUCE users are potential customers for PACE.

Let’s face it, Pace and iLok are not exactly names that are loved in the end user market. Many end users are merely willing to tolerate them, if there’s some product they absolutely need to be able to use.

There’s also many users that won’t buy products unless they are PACE licensed, it’s convenient to have all you licences managed by a single system rather than lot’s of different systems. This I suspect is why iZotope offer the option of both. I’ve certainly heard from companies who don’t implement PACE that have customers requesting it at trade shows quite a lot. It can be particularly nice when moving around a lot (although I wish iLoks could store and install your plugins just just your licences!).

I’m not saying everything PACE ever do is perfect, but I think some people are a little quick to judge and I think some troubles in the past have hurt their reputation really bad.

Let’s not forgot that they’ve helped keep a lot of people in this industry in jobs. Although I do believe times have changed there certainly was a point in which people (even professionals) who were prepared to use cracked versions of plugins. There was a crack some years back that I know had a serious impact on a lot companies. Some dropping as much as half of there staff and incoming dropping significantly overnight, taking many many years to recover. Others however have since managed with no licensing - so good for them.

It’s worth remembering that PACE have often been prominent sponsors of ADC so we should also be thankful for that and can likely expect that to continue too.

[danradix]

JUCE repo no longer under ROLI in GitHub
https://github.com/WeAreROLI/JUCE/ redirects to https://github.com/juce-framework/JUCE

EDIT: This seems to have been a part of the official JUCE 6 announcement, though.

[t0m]

JUCE Announces Acquisition by PACE

This announcement can also be found on the JUCE website. Initially released in 2004, JUCE became part of ROLI Ltd. in 2014. Under ROLI’s leadership, JUCE evolved into the primary framework for developing cross-platform audio applications. ROLI also worked with the JUCE team and the vibrant JUCE community to create the Audio Developer Conference, the foremost meeting of audio software and hardware developers. Roland Lamb, founder and CEO of ROLI, said, “It has been a pleasure and an honor for R…

[Willogical]

So JUCE is now even more legit?

[t0m]

Thank you @anthony-nicholls for raising all of those points. The JUCE team has had to keep quiet until the official announcement.