I was thinking about that but I don’t remember a time in history where Steinberg was in troubles because nobody was using Cubase and the reason for this being that commercial developers of VST plugins were not paying enough royalties to Steinberg.
Again, @Skrylar maybe I was not there or I didn’t know about this. I’m genuinely curious to learn/understand more.
@Skrylar was being ironic (I think)–he was emphasizing that Steinberg and Cubase did very well with that model.
The “unique draw” is the brilliance of the platform.
Nothing is really changing for the FOSS devs:
“All VCV Rack plugins that do not follow the GPLv3 license (e.g. closed-source, freeware, GPL-incompatible licenses) are permitted to be distributed non-commercially in source and/or binary form.”
I don’t know how many of them would be put off by this change? As to the users, 90% probably don’t know anything about the differences between the various FOSS licences, and 99% probably don’t care about which flavour is chosen, but they do care that the software that they love will be viable and sustainable in the future.
As I stated, at least half of the brilliance of the platform is from the devs who have shared their creations. Many of them did so because of the permissive terms on offer…
As of right now anyone can share or sell whatever they want, however they want… for various reasons some have chosen to offer plug-ins through alternative methods. The plug-in manager didn’t really become a thing until later and is still optional.
This will no longer be allowed and is a change.
Now all commercial plug-ins will have to be approved by Andrew and sold exclusively through his store.
There are some issues as a result of this which is what the thread is about. Ok
This is getting pretty far away from the license discussion, and might be better in another thread. But @ehydn, from my vantage point, the really, really significant difference in business model between those products and VCV is that VCV is open-source (and will remain so).
Respectfully, I don’t think that the VCV model is much like the competitors you mentioned. Let’s go through them:
Cherry allows only two free modules per developer, sets a minimum price of $10 per module, and takes 30% of the profit after processing fees. The $10 thing is laughable, as trivial modules that dozens of devs have implemented for free in VCV sell for $10 each. This seems to drive everything into bundles at around a 75% discount. I suspect that Cherry destroyed its ecosystem before it could even get started.
Softube does a small number of private, high-end licensed deals; my guess is that they’re initiating them, rather than responding to solicitations, but I don’t know, and I don’t know anything about their terms. I am nearly certain, though, that the terms vary depending on who the partner is.
Reaktor has a really gigantic, largely unregulated (I think) free user library with (AFAIK) no official third-party commercial libraries. I don’t think they try to regulate third-party commercial devs but I don’t think there are very many of them, either.
I think the proposed model actually combines good features from each of these. There’s an extremely robust Reaktor-like free ecosystem that many users probably never leave. There are very impressive licensed modules, with (apparently) may more to come. And there’s a curated store for commercial developers, but with much more flexible and sensible terms than Cherry’s.
@Vortico mentioned Kontakt, which is not a competitor in terms of features but which has created a phenomenal third-party ecosystem on similar terms. They have a “non-store” commercial option, but it’s inferior from both the developer’s and the user’s point of view, and the vast majority of their commercial modules go through the store equivalent. (By the way, I would buy a sample library of a Boston recorded in a bathroom).
A small nitpick: Commercial licenses will be available to sell outside the VCV Plugin Manager.
So as long as hypothetical screenshot (whether used as album art, a thumbnail, etc) doesn’t explicitly single out one of your modules (obviously you can’t speak for others), then it’s hypothetically kosher?
major sarcasm.
For VCV and Grayscale’s stuff, album art isn’t what we’re concerned about. If it’s used in good context, we like to see people bring it to new mediums. A mural on the side of a building with all ~1000 open-source plugins would be a marvel.
For other people’s artwork in general, 17 U.S.C. §101 is so incredibly vague, anything can happen.
No, it’s not getting away from the license discussion. Andrew is proposing or announcing some important changes and that’s what’s being discussed.
Didn’t you respond earlier that when devs were making code suggestions for V1 that you “weren’t around”?
About the other modulars pretty much incorrect on all fronts… Reaktor does have commercial modules from several vendors now… ToyBox, Unfiltered, etc… over 300 patchable modules last I checked.
seconding @ehdyn, in that it is discussing the repercussions of the license change, and what (at least to some people) appears to be a bulldozer to the current landscape.
@ehdyn and @Patman : but what’s the bulldozer? There is still as much permission to distribute freely as there ever was, plus you get a package distribution system that’s set up for you. The popularity figures in the Plugin Manager indicate almost two million distinct installs of free packages (not counting Core and Fundamental). That’s an enormous number.
Commercial devs on the store will proceed much as before (my impression was that it was always curated to an extent, although I might be wrong about that).
The other change is that devs have to pay back to VCV even if they’re not on Plugin Manager. This hasn’t stopped big commercial development efforts so far, and it has no effect on free development except insofar as free development is being used to drive commercial sales. But note that AS, ML, Vult, Hora, and Expert Sleepers all have major free plugin releases and are on the Plugin Manager. Sonus and Autodafe are the only ones who have a binary free release on the Plugin Manager and a third-party paid release, and Autodafe’s stuff is mostly free anyway. So it’s really just Sonos that has significant commercial releases outside the Manager and significant free releases on the Manager. One more commercial outside dev has a link from the Plugin Manager, and then there are two (BB Modules and KlirrFactory) that you wouldn’t know about at all without external research.
The really new thing, from a which-modules-are-released perspective, is that Andrew can entirely stop a module from being (legally) sold commercially, by denying a Plugin Manager booth and (the new part) denying an external commercial license. But this is only a theoretical change, and there are lots of reasons to think that this will be done very rarely, if at all.
@ehdyn : I meant that my post was getting away from the license discussion. It was an apology, not criticism of you.
Sorry, how am I wrong about Cherry or Softube “on all fronts”? Please explain. Also, I know there are third-party commercial devs for Reaktor, and I said so. See Home - Community for more. But that’s 300 (by your count) against over 4,000 instruments and effects in the user library. Isn’t the user library entirely free?
Oh ok, thank you for clarifying… it’s getting really late for me and I feel this is getting into semantics or little misunderstandings and I think we’re all here just out of concern about the future direction and trying to play devils advocate so things work out for everyone.
About the free stuff… that’s all cool but a whole other world and I’m not really talking about any of that. Someone mentioned free stuff and sustainability earlier… I just don’t get that.
Sure if someone has time to do free modules almost nothing will change for them and who cares about the license nitty-gritty.
I was only talking about commercial devs or those who have a hybrid model as many do.
The other modulars, the point is that some of the same people who work on those have expressed interest in working on VCV or vice versa… the main reason for the interest in jumping ship to VCV has been because of the freedom. With V1 it will become very similar to their models and so we have to ask ourselves would VCV have ever become a thing in the first place… Was it the freedom that caused it to go up like a rocket and is that now in jeopardy?
OTOH, Andrew obviously has a need to control the platform to some extent… there could be all sorts of crap that could go down and reflect back on the project but now Devs have to worry about him being the sole arbiter.
It’s all a bit tricky really…
@Vortico we will take the discussion from this thread and contact you directly and see if we can come to a agreement
@ehdyn: that’s fair. Absolutely, this thread has gone on because everyone here values Rack a great deal and wants to see it succeed. I think Andrew was right: the license is just one of many, many variables that are going to affect where Rack goes in the next few years. I’m optimistic and eager to see what happens (and use the results!)
Signing off (for the night and from this thread). Best wishes, all.
Triple license solution seems clever but it practice I think it means all non GPLv2, open source plugins will have to be re-licensed to GPLv2 or custom proprietary license.
MIT/BSD/Apache/CC-0 licenses are simply not compatible with „non commercial use” clause in Rack’s license. You can say „MIT but no commercial use is allowed” but that’s new license. You can invent new licenses if you want but it’s much safer to re-license to GPLv2
all plugins covered by „freeware exception” cannot be user with GPLv2 forks of Rack as well as in custom builds (because they are strictly GPLv2).
I’m not a lawyer, it just something occurred to me today.
I support the change.
For users, this is not a big difference. If you bought a commercial module outside the VCV store, send an email to the developer and ask him/her to comply to the new terms.
From the developer point of view, Rack is as open as before. You are free to develop whatever you want for your personal use. If you want to share your work (for free or for a buck), you have to check the licenses of the things you use.
If you make money out of your work for Rack, it is fair sharing the profit to make Rack better.
This comment and associated thread from my discussion to @Vortico led me to think something similar. It’s unclear if we are right though.
But even if we are, the problem is absolutely surmountable. If you share the view that you do need to be GPL3 to mention rack:: classes in a plugin, and want clean repo separation, just split code into two repos, one with your code sent in an MIT license repo and the minimal skinning and adaptation in a GPL3 rack plugin.
Yup that’s valid solution, GPL can use permissively licensed code (but no other way around). I doubt you even have to split repo, you just have to be explicit about licensing („everything is GPL except module/directory X”). Of course you have to be careful to not reference GPLd code from MIT module (a bit of minefield…). It’s a hassle but definitely doable.