Licensing Changes to Juce 8 and HISE

[larryseyer]

I've been developing a new app using HISE.

I come from a musical audio and sample library development background but I do have some expertise in programming in various languages including C, Lua, HTML, CSS, PHP.

My question pertains to the new licensing changes announced for Juce 8.

Specifically it states:

*Products that provide JUCE as a service

You may not create, make available as a service, nor distribute software that creates software that contains JUCE. This encompasses all projects and products that provide the ability to generate plug-ins and standalone software that uses JUCE.

Please contact sales@juce.com for an alternative licence agreement if you want to provide products that generate software containing JUCE.*

Does this mean all the work I've been putting into HISE will be limited to Juce 7?

Or will I be able to continue developing in HISE for JUCE for versions 8 and above?

Thank you!

[Dan Korneff]

@larryseyer I had the same question. @Christoph-Hart thinks no, but the language does seem to apply to HISE. ‍️
I'm moving forward with business as usual until someone says otherwise.

[Christoph Hart]

@Dan-Korneff The JUCE 8 license has a few issues but this is not one of them.

You may not create, make available as a service, nor distribute software that creates software that contains JUCE.

This means that you cannot offer HISE to clients that do not have a valid JUCE license themselves, so if there would anyone that is violating the license agreement it would be me because I'm offering a service that creates software containing JUCE. However this is not a problem because HISE is distributed under the GPL v3 license so HISE is completely bypassing whatever commercial license the JUCE guys come up with.

It would be a problem if I would offer a closed source binary that spits out a plugin and told you that you can use this creation without having a JUCE license (basically how Maize Sampler and Romplur are operating). This was already a legal grey area before and now it's explicitly prohibited but it doesn't change how HISE can be used with JUCE 8.

However I'm still sticking to JUCE 7 for the next 1 - 2 years and then evaluate whether the upgrade to JUCE 8 is worth it as there are other things in the license agreement which are troubling for our use case.

[larryseyer]

@Christoph-Hart

That makes sense. And thank you for taking the time to answer.

BTW, I just have to say, I am so totally impressed with your work.

HISE is an absolutely AMAZING tool!

Thank you for all your hard work on it.

Larry

[bendurso]

@Christoph-Hart Hise 4 is using Juce 7? Or not yet?

Perpetual version of Juce 7 is not available for sale anymore right? Or you can buy Juce 8 perpetual to use Juce 7?

[Christoph Hart]

@bendurso Actually, HISE 4 is still using JUCE 6, but you can of course use older versions with a newer license, you're just bound to the new license agreement if you haven't bought a JUCE 7 license before.

[clevername27]

@larryseyer It means that once again, PACE has overplayed their hand,. Expect surprisingly robust competition to materialise in the near future, bank-rolled by the larger companies. Enjoy popcorn while PACE attempts to make backroom deals with them to get around the license. Watch people fondly remember JUCE.