Licensing options

General JUCE discussion
41

I am exploring using JUCE to test out concepts I'm researching. So I am a long way from putting a product on a store, or needing to worry about licensing issues.

I have rather fallen in love with this framework. Because it is such a splendid piece of engineering. And dual GPL/commercial license is such a good idea!

But I find the licensing painful because I don't feel it is helping JUCE to succeed. I want to see JUCE succeed, but I feel it is being sabotaged by its own licensing strategy.

I think big products earning six figures are standing on Jules' shoulders and not paying anywhere near an appropriate amount. And that must be galling. That must be the feeling the box2d developers get when they look at Angry Birds.

And I think that the little fish, the minnows, are getting a hard time of it, because $1000 (or $3000) is a lot of money to find when you don't have it.

I look at Unity3D's licensing model -- it has taken them several years to summon the courage to implement it wholeheartedly, but it is a brilliant solution. Someone has posted it on the first page of this thread.

It is brilliant because it nurtures indie devs, encouraging them to grow until they are big enough to harvest. It is farming at its best. It is working on the idea that one in a hundred will succeed -- so lower the bar all the way to zero! Monetise from the ones that have learned to fly -- they will not begrudge!

I hope that JUCE is at that point Unity was a few years back, when they were still charging for Android and iOS licenses, before they made the jump.

I think that JUCE should make it very inviting for indie devs to pick it up and roll with it. Let them get up to size. When they are big enough, they will be happy to pay an appropriate amount! They will be grateful for their success!

Let the snowball accrete! As more people pick it up, the community will grow, it will spread! It is still almost invisible to the global programmer community. It is very rare I talk to a developer who has heard of it. And I think this is because Jules has not invested his energy in evangelising it, he has kept his head down and kept with the code.

I think that's what's important at this point in it's evolution -- getting the word out! Making sure that everyone who should be using it is aware of it. Forging and fostering a community. And as far as I can see that is best done with a Unity style license.

The majority of potential customers will be lone devs who don't need any kind of premium service or live coding etc. Maybe 20% will get as far as getting an app on the store. Maybe 10% of those will turn profitable.

I think it would make more sense to maximise the number of adopters.

I have no doubt that as it stands, many people are deterred by the initial hurdle of the licensing cost.

If a dev picks up JUCE and puts three months of their life into assimilating it, they are heavily invested. They will want to reuse that investment as much as possible.

Make the money from those that have succeeded! The majority of them will pay up honestly, I think, either out of conscience or as a simple business calculation (paying to remove the risk of costly legal action).

But cast the net wide!

π

42

pi is right. I agree with him completely. As an example I can state my position. I am a "freshly" graduated student from what you would probably call an Eastern Europe with very little money even compared to local conditions. I made some googling and where I live, the average salary is almost 5 times lower then that in Great Brittain (and it gets worse the more east you go). Lat year, I bought a JUCE one product licence for 478 pounds. That is almost the value of average salary here and it is definitely much more than a student is able to make per month. You see this was an extreme investment. Just try to imagine it. It is like you would pay thousands of pounds for the licence. I intended to buy the full licence which was something like 699 + VAT. The only reason I did not do that was that I had not enough money so I decided to get the upgrade later when I make some money for it. Imagine my surprise when I woke up one day and found out I am no more able to do that... Instead I need to pay $3000  to be able to release my next project which should be a simple multiplatform GUI to control some parameters of an embeded device. Let me calculate that for you... Imagine you pay 3.75 month salaries to be able to release a product for which you earn something like 1 month salary. So, do you think I will buy a new JUCE licence?

 

Another thing that is really frustrating is that had I made some more money with the product I released with a single product JUCE licence I would have bought the upgrade licence earlier and I would be fine now (the thing is that you did not announce the licensing change beforehand). But since I did not make enough money I have to pay more now. Significantly more. Do you see the paradox?

 

To summarize: As pi suggest, you will probably not get any more money from me (some miracle would have to happen and I would just have to win something or find the money on the sidewalk or whatever) but you could have if the price was lower (i.e. if it stayed where it was).

 

Also while considering the licensing options try to take into account that GB is one of the most developed countries in the world and that the options of the developers from the other countries might be much worse... Again, as pi suggests, Unity style licence would solve that perfectly.

43

I am new to Juce but not programming.  I am also quite experienced in translating MarketSpeak, which mostly makes bold and incorrect statements and tries to convince you they are true.

Before the increase a juce license consisted of All Desktops and ALL mobile Platforms and a license to ProJucer.

If I now wanted a License the sum of USD $999 is NOT marginally cheaper than it used to be simply because it comes with so much less.  You would take issue with, for instance, the Grocery store for removing the 1.5 Litre of your favorite soft drink that sold for $1.  In its place they now offered 0.5 Litre bottles priced at $0.95 and tried to tell you that it was cheaper.  Get serious.  You are either deluded or you think we are all stupid.

ProJucer is NOT yet a real product yet.  As such it is not worth anything because all it does is what the IntroJucer does for free and has complete source code.  How can you honestly charge for future functionality?  Pay now use it later.  To be honest I was bitten by such things over my life.  Not any more.

If you have ever used Visual Studio you would NOT make the claim that ProJucer is the first Realtime C++ compiler.  Ever hear of Intellisense?  How about Resharper?  Guess not because if you had then instead of trying to make ProJucer into Visual Studio without Intellisense or Resharper you would be directing your efforts to crafting a plugin for Visual Studio to work on Juce development.

Where is the Forms Designer?  Sure it is nice to be able to place simple controls and drag them around.  But how on earth do you create a Tab control and populate using the Designer without doing most of the work in code?  I do Database work and for me creating forms is fundamental.  I have not had to hand design forms since the early 1980's.  Notably Visual Studio does this for C# and QtCreator does this for C++.  5 minutes and I have a demo with Tab1 holding a Treeview, Tab2 holding a Listview, a nice toolstrip with buttons and another panel to hold my map.

Some of this might be too harsh, so I will soften it with some praise.  Juce is frickin' awesome.  As a library it is heads and tails above anything else.  It is very complete and has nearly everything you would want for your program.  It will save a considerabvle amount of time.

The tools are disappointing.  The License is outrageous.  If you did not have loyal users you would be having a lot of legal action because your page that says a Commercial License is $999 USD and you have: 

Full access to the Projucer    (unfinished proof of concept)
Own Grapefruit JUCE and Projucer forever  (if this was true I could use it on anything, even Mobile Platforms)
Updates of 4.x included
Upgrade starting at $599
Priority support on the forum
Commercial use of the library  (again untrue because it is only for some platforms)

 

This is very misleading and as a new potential user I have a serious issue with deceptive marketing.  I am not a long term, loyal user (who you have kicked in the teeth BTW) so all I can go on is what I see.  And it aint pretty.

44

I feel that Jules and ROLI are actually underestimating the commercial worth of JUCE -- trying to squeeze too much money out of too few people, and even so I don't believe Jules will be getting a fraction of what he deserves.

I think that with good marketing, 'getting started' documentation/{community support} and above all intelligent licensing, ROLI could massively increase the user base.

Currently it is very niche, I think people are only really using it for multi-platform audio applications.

But it could be used for so much more than this. It would be the "right choice" for so much more!

I think Jules merging JUCE into ROLI should be allowing him to focus on the code, while bringing in marketing experts to focus on licensing and distribution/advertising.

Supposing this has happened internally, I wonder whether ROLI are selling themselves short. The extreme license pricing suggests they have a very pessimistic forecast of the number of future adopters.

The thing is ROLI themselves are still within the same 'audio' niche.

I would hope ROLI staff would be asking themselves the following questions:

  • Do you feel you have accurately probed the marketplace, and accurately estimated the potential demand for JUCE?
  • Have you written out a comprehensive competitor analysis?
  • The demand will certainly change with the license. Have you tried asking people 'would you adopt with license X? How about with license Y?'

I would suggest the following license PER ANNUM, based upon $ income for the last financial year:

  • < 5k -- free!
  • < 20k -- $100
  • < 100k -- $500
  •  big fish -- $3000 (or $ask)

So forget per-platform. The only important thing is: how much money is this particular customer making.

It is basically a tax!  The only people eligible are those that can afford it!  Whichever bracket you are in as a customer, the license will be reasonable.

 Also my suggestion is to charge PER YEAR!

The pain is coming from trying to get money from honest people that don't have it. The dishonest ones will just keep quiet, as will the honest ones that have the money.

Remember when Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce a Poll Tax for Britain that charged everyone equally? That's what brought her down! It's a crazy idea. But software vendors are doing it everywhere.

Of course it would now be the turn of the people making a lot of money to complain: "Hey, we were getting a steal, and suddenly we have to pay an appropriate amount!" But insodoing they would be sticking their necks out as bad people. And the response would be simple: "The old system was not proper. It was eroding the community. Like a taxation system that overworks the lower class, while the upper-class can just jump over it. It is for the best interest of JUCE's future to change this."

The other source of complaints would be people who have recently forked out masses of money. This happened with Unity3D. Suddenly they made Android and iOS free, and were bombarded by a wave of anger from small-time developers who had paid $600 a hit.

In the case of JUCE, maybe this money could be offset against future license fees: "As an existing license holder, your annual payments will be halved when you enter the higher brackets". Suddenly they find themselves sitting on very attractive shares.

What I'm sketching is a basic idea. It could even be simpler: Free for < 10k, otherwise 5% of annual profits. Who would complain?

π

PS finally I would recommend the following clause: "The aim of the license is to return of a fraction of JUCE derived profits to the team in a way that is fair to all parties. If your situation is such that this license would not be fair to you, you are welcome to contact licenses@juce.com and make a case!"

45

The pain is coming from trying to get money from honest people that don't have it. The dishonest ones will just keep quiet, as will the honest ones that have the money.

This. As a college student with loans, rent, etc. I'm trying to save every dollar I can to get a desktop license someday so I can release my first few projects for free in order to build a mailing list without having to release the entire source code I've been working on every night for the last several months.

Like pretty much everyone else here (or anyone who uses JUCE, really) I absolutely love JUCE. I recommend it to co-workers and collaborators (none of whom have ever heard of it) everywhere I go, and I use it for every single one of my own projects I develop in my spare time. I have no idea if I'll ever make a single penny if I ever do buy a license, and it gets even harder when bringing in a collaborator because then the cost doubles for whatever platforms we need. If I was the owner of a multi million (or even multi thousand) dollar company, I'd have no problems throwing money at ROLI for new features or more licenses or whatever.

It doesn't help that the licensing feels shady since the 4.0 introduction. It's impossible to tell whether the Indie license, which is $50/month (but secretly only available as $600 a year via small print) is a better deal than than the $1000 lifetime license with $600 upgrades because there's absolutely no timetable for when the version number will be arbitrarily increased to 5.0 and invalidate the lifetime license. Also, as has been said, the Projucer looks like a prototype, neat real-time compilation tech with a clunky text editor stuck on top.

A big part of this whole "getting/keeping customers" thing is trust, especially with a non-tangible licensing-oriented product like a software library. Based on the glacial movement of things actually happening centering around opaque words like "waiting on website updates" and "hopefully happening in the next few days" (aka happening in several weeks), I write all my classes using as little JUCE code as possible, because I want to be able to bail if needed. I've contemplated writing up my own OpenGL/IPlug concoction for plugins, but I haven't gone through with it because it's obviously just so much faster (which is the whole point of using a library) to just toss in JUCE classes like Image if I want to do image operations or VectorFloatOperations if I want to multiply a bunch of contiguous data or something.

It would be nice if we could get some words from someone, anyone at ROLI about whether anything is going to happen soon for the little guys on the licensing front.

1 Like
46

Currently it is very niche, I think people are only really using it for multi-platform audio applications.

But it could be used for so much more than this. It would be the "right choice" for so much more!

Exactly my case again. You see, I was brought to JUCE after some googling when I needed to write an audio processing application. And it had all the things I needed. So I buyed the licence (as written above). Now I wanted to use it for something else - much simpler project, no audio processing. But I found I just cannot do that because I would have to pay $3000 which is many times more money than the amount of money I would get from the customer.

 

So yes, this way, JUCE is usable only for audio application and with the current licencing system, it will definitely stay this way.

47

I fully support and totally agree with the last two posts by pi.

48

I've never used JUCE before and new to programming in general. I am a latecomer and discovered JUCE just before JUCE 4 was released. Since the price increase I've been struggling to decide if I should use JUCE. The $1000 one-time fee is a big investment for me, most likely too big. I don't think I could afford the license fee for every member of my team of 2 (potentially increasing). I don't need projucer or priority support.  What drew me to JUCE was the GUI features. I hope there will be a lesser/affordable license of JUCE for indie developers.