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

  • @rockSlayer
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    11 months ago

    Section A in section 3 of the LGPL is the out here for unity:

    a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the object code that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License.

    As long as there is prominent notice with the distribution of the plugin, unity doesn’t need to distribute the source code.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 months ago

      You mean “3. Object Code Incorporating Material from Library Header Files.”? That section 3? I think they’re using a bit more than just header files. Section 4 “Combined Works” is the one that applies here.

      Also even if section 3 did apply they’d need to follow 3.b as well as 3.a and include the full text of both the GPL and the LGPL.