[devenblake]

Disclaimer: *I'm not your target audience*; I don't plan to use your product even if you made it public domain.

I never want to agree to an EULA before starting to develop something outside of a professional setting. That's an immediate dealbreaker for me. But even if I did - I wouldn't be able to disassemble or reverse engineer your software (2.2)? Also - why are there so many clauses in the EULA telling me to obey really specific laws? Aren't these redundant to section 2?

[julesrms]

We have two user-bases in mind:

- end-user developers. This is kind of like being a user of any other language, there's no EULA, nothing to sign, you just write SOUL code, test and debug it with whatever tools (which may themselves have a EULA, but probably nothing heavy)

- device and host developers: These are the people writing DAWs, plugins, hardware that can run SOUL code, audio device drivers etc. These are professionals, and licensing is a normal part of life when you're doing this kind of work.

[jdmoreira]

The JIT for a language must be licensed? I was totally onboard and super excited before I read this thread.

[julesrms]

sigh... The JIT engine in your graphics driver stack will contain millions of lines of heavily-licensed, patent-riddled code.

But that doesn't stop you as a developer from freely writing a 3D game that runs on it.

Same here. Think of it as a device driver. Ideally we'll open-source everything eventually, but anyone who's ever been involved in real-world commercial software development will understand that things aren't always quite that idyllic when you're building a business around it.

[noahadavis]

Which group would a DAW and plugins developed by a FOSS community like KDE or GNOME belong to?

[julesrms]

We've been using a BSD-style license to make sure we don't stop those people using it if they want to.