Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
lemmy.world
VLC for Unity integration

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

  • uhmbah@lemmy.caEnglish
    1331·
    10 months ago

    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."

      • Bogasse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        9·
        10 months ago

        I suppose there are a lot of companies who would be glad to make you pay for their proprietary video standard, we would just pay for something formerly free 😟

    • alienangel@sffa.communityEnglish
      38·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        10 months ago

        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.