JUCE has been acquired by ROLI!

Big and exciting news: JUCE has been acquired by ROLI!

Yes folks, after spending a decade toiling away on my own, the time has come to take JUCE to the next level, by getting more people and resources involved, and being a lot more ambitious in its goals.

Developing it as a one-man-band has been great, and was definitely the best way to build it to this point, but the library's scope and user-base have grown to the extent that one human just can't physically keep up any more!

So for a while I've been looking around for a partner with whom I could team up, and am very lucky that ROLI came along when they did! I was resigned to the idea that I'd probably end up selling it to some kind of large faceless corporation where it'd be end up being buried in bureaucracy, and where I'd be locked-into spending a few frustrating years working with people who I disliked.. So I'm very relieved that ROLI isn't like that at all - they're a young, energetic start-up with a great team and some really cool product ideas. They really "get" JUCE, and it's going to be a key part of the business that we build together. I'm still going to be running the project, alongside a great bunch of people who I already consider to be friends rather than just co-workers. Officially, I’ll be joining ROLI as Head of Software Architecture, helping them create amazing next generation interactive hardware and software products.

I'm sure there are bound to be a few of you for whom this news will induce FUD, but please don't panic: this will be a good thing! We don't have any nasty surprises planned! For now, everything will be business-as-usual - I'll still be on the forums answering posts and fixing bugs. Other people will be helping me with the admin tasks and website work, which means we'll be able to quickly start improving things like documentation and examples, and will address some of the website gripes that I've always been a bit slack about.

And for the foreseeable future, it's still going to be me who either writes or approves every line of code that gets into the library. I'm hoping that within a couple of years we'll have a team of brilliant coders who are all pumping out code that perfectly matches the quality and style of the JUCE codebase. But in the meantime, I'll be guarding the repository with an iron fist, and nothing will be released until I've checked, cleaned and approved it myself. But even in the short-term, by having a team behind the scenes working on features, and with me acting as more of an "editor-in-chief" role to ensure that the code meets the required standard, we'll be able to be a lot more productive without losing the consistency and style that is so important to JUCE's success.

Something that will change with this is that there'll be more focus on community building, as the JUCE community is a central part of its success. We're going to be very keen to keep everyone happy - probably even more so than my occasionally.. erm.. grumpy forum presence might have suggested in the past!

To kick this off, we're planning some JUCE meet-ups in Europe/USA in the next couple of months, so it'd be great to meet people face-to-face and hear what you think over a beer!

Here is some more info about the JUCE meetups: http://www.meetup.com/JUCE-Meetup/

Pleas let us know where you would like us to come next, and what you would like to see happen there!