Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
Found the article where the screenshot came from, and wow it’s even more infuriating! The VideoLAN folks tried to work with them for months, and Unity seems to have cranial rectal inversion.
Unity is probably developing their own video player and they wants devs to pay them for it, not use VLC for free.
For anyone wondering:
- There was a plugin on Unity Store that acted a bridge between Unity and libVLC, which allowed developers to make video players inside the game engine. As the post says, it got removed.
- This plugin isn’t made by VideoLAN, it’s made by a company named Videolabs that includes several people who supposedly have contributed a lot on VLC and FFMPEG.
- The Videolan team made a blog post about this, if you want to know more: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
I also thought VLC was a bit shaky on their legality as well, but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc) with more lax copyright laws, they got away with it.
So I wouldn’t blame an app store for not wanting to take on legal gray area risk.
VLC is just a media player. It isn’t on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn’t on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren’t the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
But I shouldn’t be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the “legal gray area risk” that you mean here?
For context.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-vlc-can-ship-a-free-dvd-player-why-cant-microsoft/
Under French law DVD and Blu-ray codecs aren’t patentable and VLC is based in France. The organisation isn’t breaking any laws.
Whether using VLC in the US is the legal grey area.
So it’s not VideoLAN who might be breaking a law, it’s you by circumventing the anti piracy keys in DVDs and Blurays. Millennium copyright act and anywhere that signs up to a treaty containing reciprocal copyright law might have an issue.
Patent infringements might also be possible in the US if you edited that open source code in that country, but US to EU patent treaties don’t cover software France deems unpatentable so distributing the codec is probably fine as long as it’s of French origin (and non-commercial use as per the GPL licence)
In the UK, the codec might be patentable now after Brexit interestingly but we haven’t yet diverged on patent treaties with the EU yet as far as I know and we’re part of the US patent treaty still.
Similar things happened with MP3 codecs in Linux before it was also made free. You’d either be prompted to make the choice to install yourself during or after the install. Or perhaps 2 downloads offered, one with and one without.
All to show you as an individual made the choice to use those codecs. If there were any possible damages from an individual download is would be less than $40 in licencing. So a lawyer would have to submit a case for each individual for that as a possible settlement, not even guaranteed.
As long as a large organisation isn’t liable for the codec install, it falls into “de minimis” legal territory.
I remember a Live CD install of Ubuntu required some hoops to get codecs at one point in the distant past. I looked it up then out of curiosity.
I think the discussion below your comment is good, but your comment, and the community response (in the form of comment votes), illustrates a problem I have with the lemmy community.
Counter arguments are important.
It seems Lemmy has an even bigger problem than Reddit did with circle jerks. Any counter argument that goes against the grain is immediately pounced on here. Especially if you don’t write a page long disclaimer that you don’t necessarily agree with the decision, I’m one of you, etc.
I simply pointed out that <hated company> may have had a good reason to consider <3rd party plugin> a big enough legal liability to triage out of their store for the time being, based on some half remembered related knowledge of murky legal details of the past.
You immediately implied that I’m some sort of corporate shill, even if it was politely worded. And the community piled on in response.
It would be nice if there was at least an attempt to understand both sides of an argument here.
Most of the people downvoting you dont seem to understand why VLC is only quasi legal in the US.
Because it can read DVDs. Which is evil (because they ought to pay a license). That’s all there is to it.
Wait, people are still using Unity after they clearly demonstrated they’ll fuck you on a whim? Honestly, seems like everyone’s been given a fair warning about dealing with these scumbags. I get migrating a codebase is a motherfucker, and sometimes it is even easier to redevelop much or all of the project. But again, if you’re renting retail space from someone who is a psychopath, bipolar, and an arsonist (Unity in this case), and they might burn your shop down at any moment, sometimes you gotta move!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when a company does something that shows it doesn’t have its customers’ best interests in mind, it’s imperative that it be immediately and wholly abandoned.
Companies have long since learned that we’ll ignore major red flags for the sake of convenience, and at this point they’re not even trying to hide the flags - they’re proudly flying them and laughing as we continue to give them business.
This is a good policy, but it’s not always that simple for people who have been making games on the engine. Many people have spent years of their lives working on projects using Unity, or have already released products using Unity which they are now supporting. Changing a project to another game engine is a massive undertaking, so Unity has a semi-captive consumer base in the short term.
This is the same reason oracle is still in business. AKA the ol’ trap and gouge.
Oh come on! They’re software developers! The code they wrote three years ago is total shit and you (we) know it, haha.
Take the time to learn something new, today. It’s practically what makes a software developer a software developer. If you’re not learning a new language, engine, or technique pretty regularly you’re going to have a hard time (eventually).
The reason why software developers reinvent the wheel so often is because we know that the old wheel is garbage. It at least, the way we used it was. After being a software dev for a few decades, looking at your old code should always give you a feeling of, “I could’ve done that better.”
Yeah! Everyone stop using Microsoft products today! I’m serious.
I took this same advice in 1999. Been using Linux on my desktop ever since 👍
Just like with unity: You have to learn some new skills if you switch to something else but the benefits outweigh the costs. It’s so much easier today than it was back then and this seems to be a universal truth: The sooner you switch off of any abusive platform the more quickly you’ll reap the rewards.
Even better: Later, after everyone who didn’t switch is bitching about the latest nonsense from their abusive vendor of choice you can rub it in their faces and be like, “I switched to Godot ages ago and I am so glad I don’t have to deal with this kind of shit anymore.” Just like how Linux users say similar things about the latest bullshit from Microsoft whenever it comes up in the news (which is often, which is why it’s become a trope).
Uh… Ofc they are?
Even after all this I’m about to start a new game using unity. Why?
Because there’s no way I can bring it to market with the ecosystems available in any other major engine given the type of game that it is. I’ve already prototyped for almost a year using various options to narrow it down.
I would be forced to build so much from scratch for the mapping tech that I’d never ship it in say Godot.
Do I want to use unity? Hell no, but am I going to give up on my dream because screw unity? Hell no. I’m not into pyric victories.
It is classic internet outrage complely disconnected from what smaller game devs have to go through. Don’t get in the way of a good internet outrage as a legit, actual gamedev who knows why this is damn near impossible, or you’ll get downvoted.
The whole argument of leaving Unity hinge on the fact that Godot is a close replacement, it is not.
Front VLC blog, link in post above
"After months of slow back-and-forth over email trying to find a compromise, including offering to exclude LGPL code from the assets, Unity basically told us we were not welcome back to their Store, ever. Even if we were to remove all LGPL code from the Unity package.
Where it gets fun is that there are currently hundreds if not thousands of Unity assets that include LGPL dependencies (such as FFmpeg) in the Store right now. Enforcement is seemingly totally random, unless you get reported by someone, apparently."
Any reason not to expect all the others to get reported now? If Unity wants to tear themselves down, might as well speed it up.
According to the article, unity is literally built on software that uses this licensing, so it’s weird that they’d start going against it now. Their runtime literally includes it
Depends on the reason they chose to have selective enforcement.
A good analogy is kicking someone out of a bar. If you do it because they’re a dickhead… perfectly fine. But if it’s because they’re black… not OK.
… so what you do is set up a rule that everybody will break - “no drinking with shoes on” - and only enforce it against people you want to kick out 👍
What pisses me off about the whole Unity thing is that if Unity makes itself eat shit then it just further consolidates engines into fewer hands. Godot is great and all but it doesn’t have everything Unreal has (I’m not throwing shade it’ll get there dw) and I really really don’t want Epic to have a bigger stranglehold on the games industry than it already does.
Unity had its niche and if the executives could stop fucking around it would be lovely to have as a competitor in the landscape.
Also to everyone saying “just don’t use Unity”: there are a lot of people who have put a lot of time and money and effort into learning Unity and it’s not exactly as easy as you think to just switch to an entirely new workflow. You also have to consider how impractical it is to switch engines mid-development. There’s a reason why Unreal 5 has been out for multiple years and we’re only just seeing games developed with it now. Developers (especially ones with big budgets and all the caveats they come with) don’t want to ship a game with the latest and greatest engine if there’s kinks to be worked out. This is why you still see Unreal 4 in games released today.
It almost makes me think the higher ups got paid to kill Unity. All the C-suite got golden parachutes if they kill the project now.
Then I remember OGL and the fat lack of competition they had, and remember C-suite often don’t know what they’re actually in charge of. Malice vs stupidity and such.
Epic donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Godot when Unity was being dumb this summer, so either they think an open-source project is on the brink of making their competitor unprofitable and collapse, and think enough of the studios jumping ship will come to Unreal to cover that sum, or they’re concerned that someone will start enforcing antitrust laws and want something to point at to say they’re not a monopoly.
Epic is just a troll company. They donated to Godot when it served as a jab in the side of their competition (unity). Their entire business model is to inflict Stockholm Syndrome on their users via free games.
You are 100% correct of course. I do want to add that depending on the works/software of others is also a risk as well. It’s the tradeoff made when the developer decided not to build an engine from scratch. If the game engine company becomes shaky, the developers have to weigh that in when looking at the cost of switching or not. Or maybe everything will be fine.
