A few users have been PMing me to ask about the so-called ‘pro’ version of Cabbage. The ‘pro’ version of Cabbage provides an extra export option in the main Cabbage IDE that encrypts the .csd file so end users can’t read it. It also replaces ‘CabbageAudio’ with your company name when the plugin is being exported. Therefore it will show in a DAW under your company name rather than CabbageAudio. It also bundles Csound with the plugins on Windows and OSX. This make distributing the plugin more straightforward.
The cost of a licence is $500 and that covers you for as many plugins as you wish to release with that major version of Cabbage. The major version right now is 2.3.0 and I don’t expect we will see a version 3 for a few years at least.
Note that you are free to sell any plugins you make with the public free version of Cabbage. But under the terms of the GPL, you have to share the Csound source code with them*. If this is a problem for you, you will need the Pro version.
I usually advise people to develop their plugin to the point of it being production ready, and then make a decision on whether a pro license is needed or not. Finally, note that each pro version is bespoke. So you will need to liaise with me in advance of any purchase. Just PM me for more details.
technically you can also encrypt the csd code yourself by hacking the open source version of Cabbage, but under the terms of the GPL you will have to release the source code for the encryption, so it basically equates to the same end result: users will have access to your code if they want it…
Hey Rory: I received a research grant and want to use a portion of the funds to purchase a pro version of Cabbage. How can I facilitate this? The grant funds are somewhat restrictive in that I have to purchase using a university Purchase Order–will this be possible?? Thanks in advance for your response and I hope that the Purchase Order stipulation won’t make life more difficult.
Jon Nelson
University of North Texas College of Music
Thanks for the clarification and for preserving the integrity of Cabbage as an open-source framework.
Charging a fee for developers who need to create whitelabel, proprietary plugins seems like a very reasonable way to commercialize Cabbage.
I’m glad you found a way to generate some commercial funding without introducing a freemium model, which can cause a conflict of interest in open-source projects.
Thanks @brylie. I think it’s a fair model. Any updates I make at the behest of “pro” users feed right back into the public branch. And to be honest, it’s the handful of pro users that find the most bugs because they have a much bigger user base than Cabbage itself.
This is very similar to the model we used to commercialize MySQL in the early days. Seems fair for people who want to sell plug-ins they created and promote their own brand.
Hello Rory, we are students from China’s Xinghai Conservatory of Music. We want to purchase the professional version to develop some product releases. We would like to ask you how to purchase this professional version? I hope to receive your reply.
I did but I want to give away my plugins and don’t make money. I understand that for a company this might be a good deal but the only thing I want is to put the plugin the folder I want it to be. So that will cost me 500 euro just for the folder.
Where are you getting this information from? There seems to be some confusion. You can place the plugin wherever you like so long as your host knows the location.
I mean the location on where to pick my plugin in Logic is now CabbageAudio -> my plugin. There is no way to change that folder into something else as far as I know.
Ah, you mean the company name. This actually has nothing to do with the location. The unique identifier is baked into the binary files that ship with Cabbage, and the only way to modify it is to rebuild Cabbage from scratch. Providing a way to change this dynamically would violate several third-party plugin licenses used by Cabbage.
You can build Cabbage from source and modify this name yourself, but that brings you back to needing Xcode installed. I’m afraid there is no way around this.
