The following page does not mention the GPL licensing option at all and that it is allowed to disable the network based usage tracking from Juce based software when using that license :
https://juce.com/juce-5-privacy-policy
Is that an oversight?
Yes, that’s an oversight.
If you’re using JUCE under a GPL license then none of the JUCE-specific conditions apply, only the terms of the GPL.
Thanks to Xenakios for bringing this up.
What I read was that even GPL licenses involve the collection of, at minimum, IP addresses of end users. Is that incorrect? I read the policy, by the way, but it’s several pages.
So, if I use the GPL option, Juce will still collect info about my use of this forum (and the websites I come from and go to before and after) and various info through my own use of Projucer, but I can choose to have no information at all collected from my end users?
Thank you!
Chuckk
If you are using JUCE under the GPL then you are free to modify the code however you wish, subject to the terms of the GPL. This includes modifying the Projucer to remove any network connectivity at all, and removing the collection of data from your end users.
If you chose to use the Projucer unmodified then we collect some analytics about how people are using it. We also “collect” IP addresses by default because the Projucer has a built-in autoupdater that polls our servers to see if a new version of JUCE is available.
It’s a similar story for the forum and our website. There’s a certain amount of “collecting” that’s unavoidable - the forum is built on top of a managed Discourse instance that needs some of that info to function correctly, and we collect a modest amount of analytics to track things like which pages are most popular and other not-terribly-interesting things.
The legal terms and conditions appear a little scary, but that’s just our legal team being particularly careful.
Hi, t0m, thank you for the detail there. It makes a big difference.
You know, though, when you put it like that, it draws attention. How much clicking, downloading, registering and reading would I have to do to just simply know exactly what information JUCE collects from me? The legal team obviously spent a lot of time on this, and JUCE surely has a complete list of that information, so the fact that you end it with “etc.” can’t help drawing my attention. I guess I will go back to the policy and make myself an outline.
[quote=“t0m, post:4, topic:32423, full:true”] The legal terms and conditions appear a little scary, but that’s just our legal team being particularly careful.
[/quote]
That is appreciated, but, before having this chat with Xenakios on a forum for a different framework, and him taking the time to post here, I had declined to install JUCE on the basis of that official privacy policy that told me I could only turn that collection off in paid versions. More than a month went by of me trying other frameworks, and almost a finished version of one project (which would work better with JUCE) because I understood my users would have to agree to IP collection, which most of them would likely refuse.
It does seem obvious in retrospect, considering that stopping me from releasing a modified version of GPL code under GPL would violate the GPL… but, you know, err on the side of caution.
So I guess I’m just wondering how much of a priority it is to update the official privacy policy to reflect the actual licenses.
Regardless, thanks again for the clarification. Without it, I wouldn’t have used JUCE.
Chuckk