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
Why is it bullshit? AFAIK, Unity wouldn’t be able to comply with LGPL without supplying their own source code, so then this would be the only logical outcome.
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 as much as the next guy and i feel this is pretty cut and dry.
Sad to hear it, hope you’ll find something else soon.
Thankfully I’m in Canada where Collective Layoffs are heavily protected, and I have a generous package to keep me afloat until I find the right job.
It is a sad week for tech because not everyone has these protections.
No, it’s not correct. Unity’s management might think that’s how the LGPL works, but they’re wrong.
The fact that they prefer to not do something at all instead of going through the hassle of doing something properly has always been a thing at Unity. It’s correct that it is for business reasons and not necessarily logical ones.
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 source code. If Unity wants any hope of redemption they should let us inspect wtf it actually does on our computers (edit: and let us make it work for our needs).
You CAN access the source code, but it’s for corporate/enterprise partners. afaik
Charging for access is actually fine under L/GPL but after that you’re then free to redistribute at your own price. I imagine Unity heavily control how you use and distribute your modified engine (nonfree).
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?
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?