Open source development with Juce?

Commercial / Licences
1

Suppose I want to create some plugins and I want to distribute them as open source. How does that work license-wise? Can I build a plugin with the Free edition and distribute it for free (obviously while at the same time making the source code available)? Of do I have to use the open source version of Juce for that? If the latter, can I first develop it using the free edition, and only compile what I release with the open source version?

Any insights would be welcome!
Tx,

Tom

2

First, whether you pay for a license or not, you will get the same JUCE code. People who pay don’t get more features or less bugs, they only pay for the right to keep their source code hidden.

You can build a plugin with any “edition” of JUCE and distribute it for free. The license doesn’t prevent you from selling your plugin at any price. You can even sell a plugin while making its source code available. Some people might buy it, some people might build it themselves, and some people might build it and sell it at a lower price. As long as the source code is available, it’s still open source.

3

There is also a legal distinction between the “Free” License and the lesser known and advertised “GPL/Open Source” license.
If you release your code under the GPL you can remove the analytics tracking and JUCE watermark that are required with the Free version.

Like @McMartin said, all the source code is the same, there are just legal differences between the plans.

4

Thx, very clear! @mtytel : is there a manual or howto for removing that tracking and watermark code?

5

When you open the Projucer, head to the AppConfig.h in JuceLibraryCode. There you find these lines very early on:

#ifndef JUCER_ENABLE_GPL_MODE
 #define JUCER_ENABLE_GPL_MODE 0
#endif

Change this to 1, rebuild and restart the projucer. From there on you should be able to select or deselect the analytics and splashscreen in your projucer projects.

EDIT: with opening Projucer, I meant open the Projucer project in XCode, VS or whichever IDE, so you can build it yourself.

6

Great, thx!

7

I also have a question about this.
Nowhere, not even in the GitHub repository, do I see it officially mentioned that you may choose to use JUCE for a GPL project. ONLY that you must release your source as GPL if you exceed the revenue limit. I will not exceed any of the revenue limits any time soon. It seems GPL is only presented as a punishment, an incentive to pay, but I’m not sure the GPL itself is down with that. It’s GPL or it isn’t. I see the JUCE library isn’t (if it were, no one would even be allowed to use it in closed-source projects).
I saw a post explaining how to compile Projucer for GPL; but, to my understanding, anyone who did that would have to publish that modification of Projucer itself, not just explain how to do it. Am I wrong?
Also, VST has a post on their dev forum explicitly stating that you must register for a proprietary license if you wish to distribute a binary. Not sure if that’s what they meant, but that’s what it says. If that is correct, anyone using VST3 SDK as GPL is actually only allowed to distribute source, no binaries. That seems to me to violate GPL, but again, I’m not sure what was really meant.
GPL is not to be trifled with. Either you take it seriously or you don’t use it.
To my knowledge, JUCE has not actually expressly given permission for people to release JUCE projects as GPL unless they exceed a revenue limit. If that’s not the case, this needs to be stated somewhere.
Chuckk

8

The README.md does say that 5 JUCE modules are licensed under the ISC license and the others under GPL/Commercial license. Then, each JUCE file starts with the appropriate license header. For instance:

I agree with you that GPL is not presented as a nice option, and I don’t know why ROLI decided to do it like this. I guess open-source is still not well understood in the audio software world.

This statement is not correct. ROLI owns the copyright of JUCE and they can decide to license it however they want. Dual-licensing is a very common practice, and is perfectly legal. See Ableton Link, Qt, VST3 SDK, just to name a few. I invite you to read this interesting blog post which explains the advantages and issues related to dual-licensing (especially GPL/Commercial licensing): https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/dual-licensing-for-open-source-components-yeah-or-meh.

GPL requires you to publish the modified source code when you publish the binaries. If you modify Projucer and keep it for your personal use, you have no requirements of publishing any source code.

:warning: VST (aka VST2) and VST3 are different things.
The VST SDK was only released under a proprietary Steinberg license: you were not allowed to distribute the sources of the VST SDK and you needed an agreement with Steinberg to distribute a VST binary.
The VST3 SDK is dual-licensed, under the “Proprietary Steinberg VST3 License” and GPLv3. If you choose to use the VST3 SDK under the terms of the GPL, you have to publish you source code and you can publish binaries however you want. Steinberg cannot prevent you from distributing either sources, nor binaries, unless they stop licensing the VST3 SDK under GPL.

I totally agree with you! That’s why I’m super happy to discuss any concerns or questions that anyone may have on these super important topics. However, I’m not a lawyer :smile:

Most open-source projects hosted on GitHub have less information about licensing than JUCE, but people still use them. I agree with you that the wording could be improved, but JUCE is really licensed under GPL (excluding some parts with are under the ISC license) and there shouldn’t be any need for “expressly giving permission”.

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