Important changes to the JUCE End User Licence Agreement for JUCE 8

Commercial / Licences
1

Hello everybody.

JUCE 8 is approaching, and with it there are some changes to JUCE’s End User Licensing Agreement.

This post contains a summary of the most important changes, but please refer to the text of the new licence agreement itself for full details:

JUCE 8 is more than 30 days away from being released. Upon the launch of JUCE 8 all JUCE 7 subscriptions will be automatically upgraded to JUCE 8 subscriptions and will become subject to the JUCE 8 End User Licence Agreement.

A JUCE 8 licence grants the holder the right to continue using JUCE 7 (and all other previous versions of JUCE) but if you wish to remain on a JUCE 7 licence you must purchase JUCE 7 perpetual licence seats to replace your subscription seats and cancel your JUCE 7 subscription within the next 30 days. Once JUCE 8 is available we will no longer be selling JUCE 7 licences.

If you cease creating or distributing software containing JUCE before the launch of JUCE 8 then you can cancel your JUCE 7 subscription without the purchase of perpetual licences.

Tiers and Pricing

Personal Indie Pro
Annual Revenue or Funding Limit N/A Up to $200,000 No limit
Minimum Commitment for a Subscription N/A 1 month 12 months
Monthly Subscription Price per user N/A $50 $175
Perpetual Price per user Free $1000 $3500

JUCE 8 features a much more generous Personal tier, with both the personal income threshold and the requirement to display a splash screen removed. This means that, for non-commercial, personal projects, users of the Personal tier have the same rights as paid licences and it makes interoperating with the VST3 and AAX licences much easier (fixing this issue).

Having been held fixed since 2020, the prices for the Indie and Pro tiers have increased and the revenue or funding limit for the Indie tier has reduced.

We will continue to offer a 30% discount on Perpetual licence prices for existing licence holders.

Anyone who purchases a Perpetual JUCE 7 licence between now and the release of JUCE 8 will get the cost of the JUCE 7 licence discounted from the cost of a JUCE 8 licence if they upgrade to JUCE 8 in the 30 days after its release. This makes it so that there is no financial reason to delay purchasing a Perpetual licence if you need one immediately.

If you have purchased a Perpetual JUCE 7 licence within the last couple of months we will be reaching out to you with a similar offer.

Licences for product owners

Where an organisation or company is either the legal owner of a product containing JUCE, or is represented as the owner of a product containing JUCE in any branding or information supplied with the product, that organisation or company will require JUCE licences.

This is a change from JUCE 7 where an organisation or company could use the licence seats of contractors to licence software containing JUCE. From JUCE 8 the owning entity is responsible for licensing the software. The licence seats required by the owning entity can be used by contractors.

The number of licence seats required

We have clarified the language around the terms in the End User Licence Agreement that defines the number of licence seats required.

Edit: We will add exclusions to the clause referenced below, so that things like static assets that only have a cosmetic contribution to a product, audio/MIDI, and text/translations, do not require the author to have a licence seat.

Every individual contributing to or modifying the source code, object code, content or any other copyrightable work that is part of software containing JUCE, or modifying the JUCE framework itself included in any software, requires a JUCE licence seat. Separation of individuals working on products into teams does not reduce the number of licences required; all individuals that are not working directly with JUCE, but are still contributing to software containing JUCE, will require a licence seat.

Products that provide JUCE as a service

You may not create, make available as a service, nor distribute software that creates software that contains JUCE. This encompasses all projects and products that provide the ability to generate plug-ins and standalone software that uses JUCE.

Please contact sales@juce.com for an alternative licence agreement if you want to provide products that generate software containing JUCE.

Questions

If you have any questions about the JUCE 8 End User Licence Agreement please consider posting them in this forum thread. All questions added to this topic will help other licensees understand the changes.

Alternatively, if you need to ask questions privately, please contact info@juce.com.

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3

Hi, does this mean there are now no one-off licenses for Juce 8 (as there have been before) and everything is moving to a monthly model?

thx

4

No, perpetual licences are still available. See the bottom row of the pricing table.

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5

ah ok, wasn’t sure that was what that was. thx - are these still discounted for existing users?

6

Yes. I’ve updated the original post.

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7

There is also an update here:

Unlike JUCE 7 EULA, AGPLv3 is not mentioned in JUCE 8 EULA.

8

Yes, we have also moved from the GPLv3 to the AGPLv3, which will only impact people who are providing remote services using JUCE under the GPLv3 licence but not also making their source code public.

The JUCE framework is dual licensed under both the JUCE licence and the AGPLv3. You can pick which one you use, and neither are dependent upon the other.

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All JUCE 8 modules are now dual licensed under the JUCE licence and the AGPLv3, rather than having a mix of ISC and JUCE/GPLv3.

10

Thanks for confirmation. I think the license file is much clearer than the one in JUCE 7 repo. It may clarify some confusions in this post

11

Does this also apply to graphic designers that, for example, work exclusively in Photoshop and provide the assets for the plug-in UI in PNG format?
Or for musicians that provide audio samples, or presets used in the plug-in?

Is a JUCE license seat required also for those individuals?
Does it make a difference whether they are internally employed or contractors?

12

Yes, it applies to all of those examples.

It makes no difference if the individuals are internally employed or contractors. From JUCE 8 the “owning” company will need licence seats for all contractors, rather than being able to use the contractor’s license seats.

13

Does it also apply retroactively?

For example, Suppose I have paid 10 DJs in the past to create sounds for my plug-in, and I still have that content in my plug-in (still abiding the original contract with the DJs), but the collaboration with them has ended and they are no longer contributing.

If I want to purchase the perpetual license of JUCE 8. Do I have to purchase 10 additional seats just because of that?

(still, it looks to me kinda overkill that, if I decide to pay some other 10 DJs for more audio content in the future, I have to purchase 10 additional licenses just for such a small contribution, which is unrelated to code)

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14

Here we are… JUCE has become yet another american money machine. More expensive, less convenient, no improvements over the previous version.

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15

I guess, now the incentive to offer services not using juce is much higher.
Sad end…

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16

It does not apply retroactively.

This change in the terms is more defensive than an attempt to charge more for JUCE. We can use the number of different contributors, including artists, as a very rough approximation of company size, but the main motivation is that over the past couple of years we have had many difficult discussions where people have effectively partitioned off JUCE via some abstraction where the bulk of their developers are only contributing sophisticated configuration files. Under the JUCE 7 EULA this is a grey area, and people have argued that their large teams developing audio plug-ins only require a single JUCE licence seat as they only have a single developer “interacting” with JUCE code. If the abstraction were removed then it would be fairly clear that everyone is using JUCE. I don’t think the use of an abstraction makes JUCE less valuable and the new wording makes this unambiguous.

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Have you seen the new features in JUCE 8?

18

Can anyone confirm my understanding of this license change:

With a JUCE 7 monthly contract, I as a contractor could develop a plugin for a client and give them the final binary, which they could distribute as long as I continued to pay for my JUCE 7 license.

From JUCE 8 the client will need their own license.

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19

If the plug-in is owned by your client then that may be a problematic situation even with JUCE 7. From the JUCE 7 EULA:

1.5. You may not use a JUCE subscription licence to license Applications owned by a third party. Where the Licensee Content is not owned by the licence holder the licence holder must have a perpetual licence.

This is a great example of another area of confusion we have sought to clarify. We get a lot of questions about exactly this, or how the actions of contractors can lead to things like the termination of the contractor’s licence, which in turn would end up terminating the right of the client to distribute their software. Having the “owner” of the product be in full control of the licensing conditions is much easier to understand.

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20

Oh! I didn’t realise this, has this always been the case since JUCE 6, or am I just really bad at reading licenses and thought they were covered! :man_facepalming:

edit: I found the JUCE 6 EULA, and unless I’m mistaken this 1.5 clause in JUCE 7 was new and obviously wasn’t communicated clearly enough for me to have noticed… :grimacing:

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