Hacker News Reader

Did they make a commitment in the first place? It is up to the developers using the engine to make due diligence and inspect the terms of the contracts and licenses of the software they use.

I would feel very uneasy if my product was based on a framework, where the provider makes no commitment and reserves the right to change the licensing terms at any time.

View on HN

Unity made a specific committment in their terms that if those terms changed in a way that disavantaged existing developers, those developers could carry on using the existing annual release under the old terms, and also that they would notify developers of changes to their terms. They then sneakily removed that committment and almost immediately imposed this licensing fee for use of the runtime, when one of the specific advantages of Unity they promoted was not having any such fees, and retroactively applied this to new installks of all existing games. It was shameless and some company offering open source software could jsut as easily retroactively decide it wasn't open source at all.

Thanks for the info. I'm not into game dev and did not know that. That was a pretty nasty move and they should't be trusted anymore.

The last part I do not agree: a license cannot be changed retroactively if there is no provision in the original license for doing so, and no open source license have that. Even if "revoking" licenses for all prior releases were allowed, it could only work if all copyright holders agreed, which is not practical for most projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com