GPL licence for R&D - commercial license after?

Hello Julian,

I have will be developing a new type of VST plug-in effect in the following month and I am seriously considering using your framework for that…

I was wondering what would be the legal implications of using the GPL version of Juce for the first stages of research development, and switching to the commercial license before “conveying” anything on the market. Indeed, there is still a large part of technical proof of concept to be made of what I want to do, and I am starting at the bottom of the ladder financially speaking.

In particular :

Will the term of the GPL license stop when the commercial license starts?

If not, will the simple fact that I subscribe to the commercial license suffice to escape the GPL license? I am wondering how could that be since these licenses designates the same “Program”, i.e. Juce?

In the end who would have the right to claim some infringement compensations on the base of the GPL license? Would you be the only one?

Thanks in advance…

Cheers!

Etienne

Hi there

Sure, the GPL has a provision for “in-house” development, so you can use that until you’re ready to ship.

The TL;DR is: If you want to give away binaries that incorporate any juce code, you need to either publicly release the rest of your source-code under a GPL license, or buy a commercial license from me, which releases you from having to comply with the GPL for the juce codebase.

In the end who would have the right to claim some infringement compensations on the base of the GPL license? Would you be the only one?

Yes, I’m the only copyright holder involved.