Much as I love open source and the Godot engine, this seems more like a wake-up call on the importance of corporations not being able to unilaterally, retroactively change contracts in ways that impose new charges and violate existing contractual commitments that others have relied on. If they can do that then open source doesn't offer much real protection.
Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically. The whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks if you have reasonable testing. For a game that is not possible.
Nobody can take away your rights under the MIT license, there's no legal mechanism to do that. You are protected, fully, from shit like this.
> Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted.
That's a massive overstatement of the current state of OpenTF right now. Plus they're still dependent on Hashicorp's hosting which also changed their license terms in response to the project.
You're right that because it's OSS you can do this kind of thing where it wouldn't be possible at all in a proprietary system but "just fork" requires a community to organize around it. Without a bunch of backing orgs this wouldn't have happened.
Nobody can take away your rights if the contract you sign with the engine developer doesn't allow it, as people have been pointing out is the case for other engines. IIRC Unreal's contract gives you access to a particular version of the engine in perpetuity, with source and the permission to make your own additions/changes to that source. It doesn't guarantee updates, but neither does the MIT license.
Apparently this is exactly what is happening with Unity[1], where the TOS previously said that you can continue using an old version, but now they are walking this back and trying to apply fees retroactively. Whether this is legal or not might be debatable, but unless users mount a legal challenge they are probably stuck paying or finding another engine.
You're not stuck with an old version forever, that's very hyperbolic and you purposefully ignored OP's example of Hashicorp and Terraform and instead responded with sarcasm.
That's only a problem for you if you yourself have a business model that depends on curtailing the freedom of your users. Playing the victim when a license prevents you from victimizing your own customers and users in the way that has happened in this incident is pretty rich.
It is a wakeup-call also to do due dilligence and risk management when entering contracts. And yes, clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors. Or at least think very hard about.
_Some_ kinds of Open Source might help there, since _some_ open source licenses are very easy to comply with and very business-friendly. On the other hand, all the game studios now complaining would also howl and whine when forced to be GPL-compliant and release their source code.
And even with business-friendly take-what-you-want-and-never-give-back Open Source licenses, there is always the risk that the project you are using does what Hashicorp did with Terraform and stuff: Change the license for all future releases to something you won't like, cutting you off from your necessary updates and fixes. Maybe there will be a community maintaining a fork, maybe there won't.
>clicking "agreed" in the installer is very often a contract that you should run by your legal advisors.
The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
If you're reading my comment you must have read the TOS/EULA for ycombinator, firefox (or chrome), your wireless or ISP, the keyboard app on your phone, odds are you have an email, perhaps a google account, remember the OS licence. Ever listened to a music streaming service, watched youtube? Messaged using an app? Banked online? Have some managed passwords? Like games, how many? For the common people, what about social media?
That's about a dozen "contracts" and that's lowballing it, multiplied by each update to the "agreement" (pray they don't alterate further) multiplied by the requirement to also read and acknowledge the privcy policy. All this for services that have become when not essential ubiquitous and constantly shift under you. You'd need 8 figures to run that by a lawyer, or a part time job to carefully consider. That's not a reasonable arrangement.
> The law often makes use of the reasonableness standard. I'm hard pressed to believe that carefully reading the hundreds of TOS and EULA's hoisted upon us is reasonable.
Yes, but there are two sides to "resonableness": The "what" side and the "who" side. "What" is the thing that should be resonable. But the overall resonableness just as much depends on the question: "for whom is this reasonable?". While a consumer cannot possibly be expected to really read all the ToS everywhere, a business maybe can be expected to do so. Especially for things that are very critical and integral to the business, like the license of that one framework you are building all your software upon. So I do think requiring a business to read and understand the Unity ToS is totally resonable.
to be more charitable to the above, we're not talking about consumer software. if you're starting a company selling something there is a fair bit more reasonableness in asking you to read a contract
Exactly. This isn't about Joe Blow not reading the ToS for his eleventieth browser toolbar. This is about a business not reading the ToS for an essential, integral component that will cost you dearly to replace and might bankrupt the business.
What you are proposing is literally impossible. If I were to comb through every ToS and EULA and every other legal text related to tools I use as a developer, I would not have any hours left in the day for, you know, actual development. Even then, I wouldn't have time to read and comprehend all of the legal contracts. Hell, if I stopped sleeping entirely and spent 24 hours a day combing through legal contracts, I still wouldn't have enough time to go through all of them.
what use are contracts if buisnesses refuse to read them. Sure you as an employee might not but if you're running a company you really ought to read it on your key software. We're not talking about an email provider, its the key engine you're using. It's like if you didn't read the contract with the manfuacturer you hired to make your product...
Well, in Finland where I live, ToS and EULA are generally not considered to be "contracts", and for good reason.
I'm confused what you mean by saying that the employees of a business don't need to read these legal texts but that the "business" should read them. The "business" is not a physical life form that has the ability to read, only the employees of a business have that ability, since they are humans (unlike the business entity itself, which is not human). Perhaps your idea was that businesses should hire a team of lawyers whose only job should be to read through the various ToS and EULA legal texts that their other employees merely click-through?
in lots of countries, ToS and EULA are generally not considered to be enforcable "contracts"... for users of free consumer software under certain circumstances
If you as a buisness sign up to amazon web services to host your entire backbone on, you better read the contract. If you don't, you are irresponsible.
Someone, somewhere at the buisness should take the time to read a simple little document before using it as the backbone of everything they do at a company, yes. It does not have to be a lawyer...
I'm extremely sympathetic to the idea that there are too many eulas for free products, things like games or whatever where it really doesn't matter for 99.9% of users. But for the 0.1% that make their livelihood from the program, they should take the 25 minutes to read through it at least once.
I'm not saying this because im a big bad lawyer that hates you (I am not a lawyer at all), im saying it because it's a tiny thing you can do to save a whole lot of heartbreak.
You just gotta decide when its important to read contracts and when you don't care. I don't care about the contract when I get new lenses for my glasses, or when I pay for netflix. But if im moving into a new house? I read the bloody contract.
If you had read the Unity contracts before this mayhem, would you have been able to predict that Unity will screw developers over? I for sure wouldn't, because I'm not a lawyer.
Are you implying that one needs a crystal ball to predict which companies will screw you over with ToS changes in the future, and using that crystal ball in the present time, we can then skip reading ToS for all those other companies, which will not screw you over, and only read the ToS for the one company that will screw you over?
You could change the license for future versions and charge for said updates, for the market that godot targets that would be more a little screwing to them.
How long would it take for someone to take over the project (if ever).
And it's at exactly this moment the community would fork the project and development of a free version would continue. This is not a real risk for a community-driven project, only for corporate-driven projects where a single entity owns copyright on the on all or close to all of the codebase.
The important distinction isn't who owns copyright. It is rather that there needs to be a community opposed to the license change and able and willing to do the work.
One could even imagine scenarios like an originally MIT-licensed software splitting into a commercial company offering commercial paid licenses, plus a community (or even the company itself) offering a GPL-licensed fork. Of course one could then still maintain an additional MIT-licensed fork, but if the rest of the community is happy with GPL and all the development just happens there, your MIT fork will "starve"...
While I'm able to understand your argument, IMHO the MIT license is not displaying that well. Community is plural, and fork with MIT could be like Windows: Closed source. End of the (fork) line.
Given the project itself is still strong, this might not be a problem, but then I see no reason why it has chosen it in the first place if not for that specific option.
Copyright laws are all completely out of balance and stupid. As a rule, corporations can not retroactively change contracts. If this one is legal (I wouldn't try to guess), it will be because of the EULA rules.
They don't though, if any developer had the means to take it to court it is incredibly likely that Unity would lose.
While TOS are rarely worth the toilet paper they could be printed on, I'm curious about whether arguments could be made about whether existing subscribers from 2019 could now sue for breach of contract and costs associated with (re)development.
That's the big issue. This is going to hurt smaller developers more because they can't afford to fight it.
The big question is: to what extent to Unity games need to be able to talk to Unity's servers? If they're looking at number of installs (and apparently that includes pirated copies even?), serve ads, and probably provide other services, that sounds like the games need a connection to the server. In which case they may be able to disable your game if you don't pay. And then even if you could sue them, the real damage is already done.
The problem is today everything has ToS, you get a ToS update in the email and if you do not like it you have to stop using the product, and lot of software this days require an account , and has online features or requirements.
I got burned by Steam, I have a super old laptop with some old games on it, Half Life, so one day I got the laptop out, Steam updates and f** itself, the old system is no longer supported but they had to f** things up s the games won't work.
I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.
> I agree, open source is not required, but we need to own our software not rent it.
That's just a start but also require freezing your OS and have lots of spare hardware or have rights to emulate it :)
And same with data - buyed songs for example :) Big industry already is killing media you can own - cd, dvd, blueray depends on outdated cpu, pendrives decay before becoming usefull backup media...
In the age of asholess open sources and resources are best. Let's bring more viral licenses then GPL !
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.
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.
