JUCE 8 Starter license (free tier) + HISE commercial (closed source) license?
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Hi all, hope everyone is good! Am I completely off the mark thinking that this could be a viable option for releasing closed source plugins?
My thinking is that the HISE license is needed for closed source projects made with HISE, always, no debate... and with the free JUCE starter license you can earn up to 20k annually before having to get a paid license. Now that JUCE 8 doesn't require a splash screen on startup on the free tier, we don't need to mess with the HISE source code to enable it again.
Am I missing something here or could this be an option?
Any clarification on the matter would be greatly appreciated!
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Yeap, I think that sounds right.
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@JC Yep, sounds good. A couple of things to consider though:
The JUCE license covers you for use with JUCE 8 and earlier versions, so you can still use JUCE 6 in HISE if you like.
Keep in mind that with even a moderately successful plugin you can hit 20k pretty quickly, and at that point you need to upgrade. And that's gross revenue (before expenses) for ALL your uses of the JUCE code. Meaning, if you have a bunch of free-pay-what-you-want plugins, then the revenue from those counts towards the $20k.
Also keep in mind that this is all based on the honour system, so it's up to you to do the right thing.
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@dannytaurus excellent information, thank you for that! I thought though that if I keep using the standard-for-HISE-right-now JUCE 6, then I'd have to re- enable the splash screen? But if i use the new optional JUCE 8, then I don't have to do that.
Also, I'm not actually sure how I switch to using the newly added JUCE 8.....
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@JC Just FYI the JUCE 8 integration into HISE is still a little buggy imo. You can work around it but it's worth considering....
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@HISEnberg yes, I couldnt get the mulitmic sample creation to work in 8.
and had a few problems exporting the binary on mac, but i could work around that part.
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@JC Good point about the splash screen. It's probably not legally 'clean' to use JUCE 6 and also not have a splash screen. Morally, that's up to you.
As I said before, if you're selling a closed source plugin and you have even moderate success, you'll be on the $40/mo JUCE plan pretty quickly anyway, which makes it legally and morally fine.