EULA licences and Vcv rack

Befaco Oneiroi and I don’t know how many other

commercial ports of Eurorack modules have adopted a EULA

instead of a GPL3+ licence, or that is implicit anyway.

What is noteworthy is that for some devs to sell you a Vcv rack,

they now sell you a licence to a plugin.

A licence that could change at anytime. A software update and you could be unable to use your

licenced product. Because the EULA shields them from future changes that might break its use.

This is dangerous territory.

Whilst on one side I embrace this new vision, I am also worried.

There are proper licencing that protect the creator IP without going the full lenght of

denying any kind of ownership, for a digital product.

Reason has changed its policies regarding old offline installers, and closed the auth servers.

Stranding thousands of old users that bought Full, perpetual licence.

Devs and Users got burned. Propellerhead got burned.

Light DRMs are not possible anymore?

Linux has light DRMs that works and don’t need TOS and EULAs “you don’t own nothing”

It’s a licencing issue.

I’m not pretending it’s easy and I don’t have questions.

This is just a mere observation of the landscape.

So what? The code of Oneiroi is licenced GPLv3, so just port it to VCV Rack yourself.
I don’t see that you contribute anything useful to the community of VCV Rack, in contrast to hundreds of developers, who do release their code as GPL.
Maybe go trolling somewhere else?

6 Likes

Sorry, I must say this after reading your recent posts, I find your posts hard to read (line spacing, line breaks) and also difficult to understand. All I can gather is that you are on a mission regarding licensing.

If you don’t like license terms for a plugin don’t install it, problem solved. Forcing developers to use specific licenses won’t get us more or more interesting plugins.

3 Likes

Yes, paid modules on VCV are licensed. VCV+ is a subscription service, so DRM is needed to activate/deactivate modules that participate. The legal language protects us developers should we make an update that has an unintentional bug, so no you can’t sue me for a module bug messing up your set. Most of us are small hobbiests and developers, nobody is out to get you. If you don’t like the EULA, well then use some other software please.

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Oh, so that’s what the oneiroi update did? Noticed it recently and wondered if anything was given a fix or something