HISE licensing discussion with romplur discord group

[gryphonsegg]

I belong to the romplur discord group and I was wondering after a request was made to me to ask you guys of Dave Healey and Christopher Harris Hart would kindly join them at a scheduled time to go over what is involved and what the legalities are and what the consequences are of releasing a plug-in without following the rules of open source etc. there is a greater discussion happening and the folks would really like your direct input if possible?

[Christoph Hart]

@gryphonsegg what‘s there to discuss? You‘re breaking copyright law if you release a closed source product without a HISE and JUCE license. You might get away with it but you also might not so if you can live with the risk of a possible law suit and don‘t care about valuing other people‘s work, go for it.

[gryphonsegg]

@Christoph-Hart please dont think that I am doing this, I am asking because I was asked to ask you. Everyone on the Romplur forum is curious because they are considering jumping ship and there is a particular person bragging very publicly about releasing plugins using HISE without a license. Myself and others warned him and told him about your policy and he rudely responded about doing it illegally anyway because he didnt care and neither did his bills. I thought a little discussion from the creator and owner himself might protect your interests and save future headaches with folks trying to do this. I am sorry if I am bothering you or upsetting you, my point was to educate and stop potential illegal use of your product.

[ospfeigrp]

@Christoph-Hart Just out of interest whats the story with Rhapsody player instruments? I take it they dont require a hise + juce license?

[d.healey]

@ospfeigrp said in HISE licensing discussion with romplur discord group:

I take it they dont require a hise + juce license?

That depends on the license you want to release your library under.

[ospfeigrp]

@d-healey gplv3 but will that include everything including samples? like i couldnt take the virtual playing orchestra that has many different licenses for the individual wavs and map them with hise while still respecting the original license?

[d.healey]

@ospfeigrp Actually I remember having a talk with Christoph about this. For a Rhapsody library you can generally use any license you want (unless you're using my boilerplate code), however if you're using scriptnode networks or other things that include elements from the HISE codebase you have to follow the same rules as if you were making a standalone instrument.

Regardless of the license though a Rhapsody instrument's source is always accessible, so trying to make it closed source is not an option.

Samples should be released under a different license, the GNU GPL is not suitable.

[Christoph Hart]

please dont think that I am doing this,

No worries, I'm not accusing you here, I just wanted to point out that there is nothing to discuss.

Myself and others warned him and told him about your policy

So you did already what I would have done too. What I can't and won't do is go in there and start making legal threats because I'm a self respecting person and I love myself :)

Samples should be released under a different license, the GNU GPL is not suitable.

Yes, the sample licensing is a bit of a grey area, but we're going for the most practical solution here which is as long as you license them permissively enough so that people can use your GPL licensed plugin / rhapsody library, you're fine.

however if you're using scriptnode networks or other things that include elements from the HISE codebase you have to follow the same rule

That's not 100% true. You can of course use scriptnode and anything in HISE in a Rhapsody player project, however you can't export them to a C++ module (because the Rhapsody player is already compiled so it can't load custom C++ stuff). So this is rather a technical limitation than a legal one.