When we started thinking about Polaris, one of the questions we kept coming back to was a simple one:
What should it actually feel like for a developer to add licensing to their product?
Licensing is an important part of selling software, but it isn't usually what developers want to spend their time building. For an audio plugin developer, the priority is the product itself; the sound, the DSP, the interface, the presets, the performance, the compatibility and everything else that makes the plugin worth buying.
Licensing needs to work alongside all of that without becoming another large technical project, that is why we are building Polaris around the developer experience.
JUCE
For audio developers, JUCE is an important part of that story. JUCE is widely used to build cross-platform audio applications and plugins, so rather than asking developers to build a completely separate licensing system around their product, we want Polaris to fit naturally into the development environment they are already working in.
With the Polaris integration, the developer can bring licensing functionality into their JUCE-based plugin through the Polaris SDK, rather than having to design and maintain that functionality themselves, the underlying complexity is handled by Polaris.
The aim is to make licensing a natural part of the plugin itself, rather than a separate system developers have to build around.
Our goal is simple: make the common licensing tasks straightforward to implement.
The SDK
The Polaris SDK is intended to provide the building blocks a developer needs to integrate licensing into their product. Instead of having to understand the underlying licensing infrastructure, API calls, authentication, validation and the different states a license can move through, the SDK should handle much of that complexity.
A developer should be able to work with concepts that make sense in the context of their product; Is this license valid? Has the customer activated it? Is the product entitled to run? Does the license need to be renewed?
Developers need clear answers about license validity and activation without having to worry about the complexity behind it.
The API
The SDK isn't the only way to work with Polaris, behind it is an API that allows developers to integrate Polaris into their own systems and workflows.
Every software business operates differently, and Polaris is built to adapt to that rather than force a single approach. Some developers will want a quick, straightforward integration directly into their plugin, while others will want licensing to sit at the heart of a wider setup, connected to their website, customer database, ecommerce platform or internal tools. However you choose to integrate, Polaris adapts to the way your business already works.
Built in, not bolted on
This is an important principle for us, good infrastructure shouldn't constantly remind you that it is there.
When you use a payment system, you don't want to build the payment infrastructure yourself.
When you use cloud storage, you don't want to manage the underlying storage infrastructure.
And when you add licensing to a product, we don't think you should have to build and maintain an entire licensing infrastructure yourself.
You should be able to integrate it, configure it and get on with building your product, that is what we mean by developer experience, not simply about having good documentation or a clean API.
It's about reducing the amount of work, complexity and decision-making required to get from "I need licensing" to "my product is licensed."
Built around the developer
This is also why we aren't starting with a generic licensing product and trying to work backwards into the needs of audio developers, we are starting with the developers.
We are looking at how audio plugins are built, how they are distributed, how customers activate them and what developers actually need from the licensing layer.
JUCE is part of that. The SDK is part of that. The API is part of that.
But ultimately they are all there for the same reason: to make licensing easier to integrate, easier to manage and easier to build around.
Polaris is being built as licensing infrastructure for software developers and we think the best infrastructure is the infrastructure developers don't have to think about.