Open source development with Juce?

[mcmartin]

@Chuckk

Nowhere, not even in the GitHub repository, do I see it officially mentioned that you may choose to use JUCE for a GPL project.

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:

juce-framework/JUCE/blob/5.4.3/modules/juce_dsp/juce_dsp.h#L17

---

@Chuckk

It seems GPL is only presented as a punishment, an incentive to pay

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.

---

@Chuckk

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).

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.

---

@Chuckk

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?

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.

---

@Chuckk

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.

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.

---

@Chuckk

GPL is not to be trifled with. Either you take it seriously or you don’t use it.

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

---

@Chuckk

To my knowledge, JUCE has not actually expressly given permission for people to release JUCE projects as GPL

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”.