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Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store.

Arete@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

LGPL requires distributing the license with any code. I imagine unity does that with the core code, but it would be difficult to enforce that for assets distributed in their store, which they would be liable for legally. I imagine this will be resolved, but I no longer use Unity so idfc

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Davel23@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
From my understanding there are other third-party assets in the Unity store which use the LGPL but are not being removed.

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- NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Is there any information on them being given a pass?
  
  Generally stuff like this goes in waves. I have no experience with the unity store, but it wouldn’t shock me to find out they haven’t always (and still might not…) required “apps” to list their licensing. Meaning this would be a somewhat manual effort done by a severely reduced staff.
  
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- Arete@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I expect they will be unless they’re small enough to fly under the radar
  
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rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No it won’t. This is 5.10.4 of the Unity Provider agreement, it’s total bullshit.

Provider represents and warrants that its Assets shall not contain (a) any software licensed under the GNU General Public License or GNU Library or Lesser General Public License, or any other license with terms that include a requirement to extend such license to any modification or combined work and provide for the distribution of the combined or modified product’s source code upon demand so that Customer content becomes subject to the terms of such license; or (b) any software that is a modification or derivative of any software licensed under the GNU General Public License or Library or Lesser Public License, or any other license with terms similar thereto so that Customer content become subject to the terms of such license.

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- admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Why is it bullshit?
  
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  - RedditWanderer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Unity let me go earlier this week, so I’m really not in the mood to defend them, but this is correct. I’m on the Unity hate train but this is pretty cut and dry.
    
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    admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sad to hear it, hope you’ll find something else soon.
    
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    grue@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, it’s not correct. Unity’s management might think that’s how the LGPL works, but they’re wrong.
    
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  - tabular@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You are only required to give source code for changes to that part for LGPL code. So only the library requires that.
    
    Other game engines supply thier source code. If Unity wants any hope of redemption they should let us inspect wtf actually does on our computers.
    
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    merthyr1831@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You CAN access the source code, but it’s for corporate/enterprise partners. afaik
    
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  - rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Unity uses the LGPL for parts of their own products. The GPL in most cases only requires that derivative work must also be shipped with the same license. The source code from providers doesn’t have to be distributed by unity, it has to be distributed by the provider. In this case that would be videoLAN, which has all their source code on GitHub. You can read the text of the LGPL here, and this is VideoLAN’s post about the situation.
    
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    admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That puts things into perspective, thanks!
    
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    nybble41@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    The GPL in most cases only requires that derivative work must also be shipped with the same license. The source code from providers doesn’t have to be distributed by unity, it has to be distributed by the provider.
    
    This is incorrect. The distributor of derivative works in binary form is responsible for providing the source code. They can refer to a server operated by a third party, but if that third party stops providing the source code the distributor remains obligated to ensure that it is still available. The only exception is for binaries which were originally received with a written offer of source code, where the offer can be passed on as-is, but that only applies for “occasional and non-commercial” distribution which wouldn’t work here.
    
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  - asret@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I thought the point of the LGPL was to allow this sort of usage without requiring the release of source code. It’s an extension of the GPL to remove those requirements isn’t it?
    
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  - FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I admit this is totally not my area, but couldn’t you say that about literally any online source that sold software from Steam to the Apple App Store?
    
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deadcream@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not just license. You also need to link to it as a shared library and allow users to replace it with their own build of the library. Meaning you can't use stuff like DRM and anticheats.

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- Arete@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yup fair point I didn’t know that. Unity presumably does this with dlls that a technical user can easily swap out. In principle an asset store script could do this, but it would be very difficult to verify and enforce so I can see why they’d just ban the license outright as a CYA thing.
  
  Maybe the answer is to distribute a vlc dll separately and only ship a linking/driving script via the asset store.
  
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FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not exactly. The LGPL inherits the methods of conveying source code from section 6 of the GPL, which has a number of different options. You can bundle the source code along with the compiled version, but you can also do it simply by including an offer the end user can redeem to get a copy of the source. For example you could include a link to the source code.

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