Can I publish with someone else's Unity Pro Licence?

I just started with unity and I am working on my first game... which requires a Pro feature.
Since I don't own Unity Pro yet, but the company that I am working for does... I was wondering if I can compile my Game with their licence and publish the game under my name, or is that breaking some EUAL rules with Unity? (I have the permission from the company to work on my game there)

 

According to the EULA, you need one copy for each developer using Unity Pro. Furthermore you cannot mix Unity Free development with Unity Pro development. Everyone either needs to use Free or Pro.

 

So I would need to program my whole game here... but would it work in that case?
I am freelancer who makes demos in Unity for this company (they use unity for presentations), and I am the only guy who uses it... the question is still, can I use for my private game too if I have the permission of the company?

 

I think this is a better question for Unity directly. Why not email sales@unity3d.com and ask them? But my guess is that the answer will be no. And each person in your company needs to have a license for Unity if they use it. If you're not the only developer working with Unity for that company in that same license then it is not properly licensed.

 

It's licensed per developer so you're fine if it truly is you that uses it, as it should be under your name. As for the Free / Pro cross over this is really to stop big teams all using free and publishing using Pro, if it's just you and both are licensed to you I think you're fine, if you only use Pro to finish and don't use them side by side. Although you get a license for 1 developer to use on two machines...why not just install the other one at home?

 

Thanks for your answers guys, but I think ill contact unity directly with this.
Thanks again!

 

I'd say no,..in that,..sure when you are at your employer's company using it,..you are a dev for them,..and thus,..they provide you with a Pro version. But if you are publishing a game yourself,..then You are your own employer and You must provide a Pro license for yourself,...but I am no lawyer

that said,..this thing about mixing free and pro makes me ask,.

can't I develop my game in Free,..and then , in the event I absolutely need a pro feature,..eventually buy a Pro to finish and publish with?

 

That should be totally fine. You're just not allowed to mix Free and Pro in a company (e.g: you own Pro to publish and your employees have Free for developing).

 

This is exactly right. The license is owned by the employer so it's a separate entity.

 

The license terms state that you cannot use multiple licenses for others, even as a business without some form of enterprise license. Therefore, each business has to purchase a license for each individual using Unity.

So if you join a company that uses Unity, they have to purchase a license for you. That's my understanding of it. And no, I don't like it.

I would prefer as a business to purchase x amount of licenses of which are used by staff. Seats.

 

Do you take your company's pens and sell them? Your employer should be worried about your character that you're even asking such a question.

 

Well it's a question for your company really not Unity as long as it's one license per user,.

@Whippets

As long as they ask I don't care if my staff want to do their own projects out of hours, I see it as a perk of the job!. I'm unsure why this is a bad thing if done right?

 

No.

If you are publishing/releasing your game under your own name, and not your employer's, you do not have the legal right to publish with Unity Pro, as the license belongs to your employer, not you.

If you wish to publish a game under your own name, you will need to purchase a Unity license registered to your name.

TLDR;

You can only publish with Unity Pro if you are the legal entity that the software is licensed to.

 

@Meltdown that seems miswritten or otherwise very weird (or I misunderstood what you wrote). What if I decide to use a publisher for one of my games, and thus they publish my game under their name? Surely they're allowed to publish my game even if they don't own Unity Pro (as long as I have it).

EDIT: Unless with "publisher" you just mean "the guy who compiles the Unity build"?

 

In that case you are granting a publisher the rights to distribute your software through a legal agreement. You are providing the publisher with built software, which they in turn distribute, which is fine, as they are not 'building' anything with Unity.

If your agreement with the publisher was that you provide the Unity project to them, so they can localise it to their region etc, they would need their own Unity Pro licenses as they would be making the builds and distributing them.

In the OP's case, he is trying to build and publish a Unity project as his own legal entity, using the Unity license of a 3rd party legal entity (his employer), which is not allowed.

 

If the employer gives permission and they purchased the license for the end user (employee), it shouldn't matter. If you purchase Unity pro, location whether a place of work or home is irrelevant. If you bought the license for staff use, that is what it's for?

Where in the EULA specifies otherwise? If you were company A trying to re-distribute software of a third party nature to company B then I could see a massive issue and most EULA's don't account for that or prohibit.

Since when has the license been per project for a specific company? It's a user license.

 

As specified in the EULA, the use of the license is solely for internal use. i.e If a company buys licenses for their employees, the license is granted for internal use of that company.

1. Grant of License

1. Use Rights. Conditioned upon your compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement and payment of all applicable fees, Unity grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable license: (i) to install and execute the executable form of the Software, solely for internal use by a single person to develop Licensee Content; and (ii) if you have licensed a version of the Software other than a trial or educational version, to distribute the runtime portion of the Software, on a royalty-free basis, solely as embedded or incorporated into Licensee Content and solely to third parties to whom you license or sell Licensee Content pursuant to an agreement that is no less protective of Unity and its licensors as this Agreement. You may not sublicense the rights granted under clause (a)(i), but you may sublicense the rights granted under (a)(ii) solely to third parties to whom you license or sell Licensee Content to act as distributors thereof pursuant to an agreement no less protective of Unity and its licensors as this Agreement.

 

That is way too ambiguous to have a standing, internal as in to the account registered address? Addendum to end user publication per project? It doesn't specify any use cases for an employee. "Internal use" could mean anything and as stated in a fair few country's, ambiguity rules in favour of the third party.

In short it's too vague and it doesn't seem to say that at all, pretty much reads to me. You can't transfer the license, you can't have third parties (external) use your software and the license is restricted to one user developing software we say you can make, by the way Unity should have a point reference in that part of the clause.

 

in my opinion the wrong part was bolded. "...to develop Licensee content" is the pertinent bit. Even though a per seat license is required, the company is the licensee not the employee.

 

Thanks for the explanation @Meltdown, I indeed misunderstood what you wrote

@hippocoder It appears that per seat, even if somehow strict, is actually the only choice if you have a studio, so you should be good with it.

Hiring a lawyer to understand each software license you buy would be crazy (unless you're a big company). That's what forums are for. Uh, other than to generate more confusion

 

As it's per seat only, how is the company the licensee? You'd need an overarch license.

As izitmee says, if I have to get a lawyer from our legal dept. to be present every time I buy a piece of software. It would be a nightmare and the license would probably be revoked on grounds of ambiguity. I'd never get anywhere ..

So maybe someone from Unity could comment?

 

Agreed @ShadowK , it is a bit vague, but I'm also trying to look at the EULA from a 'common sense' perspective.

If a company of 5 people licenses your software, you would only want the licenses to be valid for that company (a legal entity), and the games that company makes.

If every employee in that company had their own little registered indie company on the side, and they used their employers licenses to publish, that means essentially each company gets 2 x Pro licenses for the price of one, or if you look at it another way, 5 little indie company's are getting free Pro licenses.

Let's throw one more egg into the mix... what happens if one of those little indie companies on the side decide to make a gambling game using their employer's license, and publish that game and Unity finds out about it?

Who does Unity go after? The parent company who had no idea one of their employees was using one of their licenses for their own indie company use? Or do they go after the indie?

From my view point, it makes sense that each legal entity using Unity, is appropriately and individually licensed.

 

@Meltdown

Some great points there, I'm trying to wrap my ahead around the specifics because it would be a shame if my staff couldn't do their own side stuff. There is a clause in their employment contract stating they can't create products in direct competition or with our tools etc. unless otherwise stated.

Anyway, I bought the licences for my staff to use. They should be able to use it..

 

Cool, but perhaps add in a gambling clause too

 

Well technically, couldn't the company grant publishing rights to him then? (He said the company is okay with him working on his own games)

 

Well, if that was legal, I may as well start my own 'Unity publishing' licensing business. Where I grant any 3rd party one of my Pro licenses for the period of 24 hours to use and publish one of their games. And charge them a few hundred $$ for it. And after the 24 hour period, they have to de-activate the serial.

Silly example, but it shows the kind of exploitation that could occur if 'granting a 3rd party rights to use your license' was within the rights of the EULA.

 

This is exactly my immediate thoughts.

As an employer I've always been happy to let people make games using work hardware and software as long as it doesn't detract from their work in any way. However, note that "make games" and "publish games as the company" are two quite different things. Even putting aside the super obvious stuff like who gets the income, there's a lot of other risk involved - like what happens when a support call comes in, or what possible damage could it do to the brand?

 

Well you could have if you hadn't opened your big mouth! haha just kidding.

Think about it this way.

If it's non commercial and you just want to see how it looks with pro features... build it with a trial version.

If it is commercial, it should give you $1500 of profit ... right? I mean you've worked at least a couple of months, so you'd think it'll give you that much profit eventually.

And also if you did invest at least 3 or 4 months of hard work... after all doesn't your game deserve that you invest on your own license?

 

Good to know, thanks for the info Aurore.

 

I just found this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/issue-creating-an-ipa-for-another-company-with-xcode-6.272004/ I am not sure that I understand the problem completely, but isn't that the same as what I wanted?
Using unity to develop something, then sell it to somebody else so they can publish it under there own name... or am I understanding something wrong here? (my english is not that great)

 

That is not the same situation. Providing prebuilt ipa or a xcode project for a customer who does use Unity at any point will not violate any license cause the only one using Unity is the OP.

 

From my understanding the customer gets an xcode project that is ready to be rebuild and published... it doesn't need to have unity, or?

 

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to argue about my licence situation here, in fact I already made the choice to preorder 5, but just for the sake of my understanding of the EULA. The only difference in that post and my question of borrowing is a contract between the client and the company and a bill at the end of the project.
You already mentioned in a post above that "No, the employer cannot grant rights to the employee." but isn't that the case if they sell me the final code?

Example: I order the company that I am working for to develop me a game, they use their licence, sell me the final xcode project and charge me 1$ of it. Now if I rebuild that xcode project with my provisioning file and sell the app (without owning a Pro licence)... they are violating the EULA?

 

Difference here is that in your case you and your company both have separate Unity install/end user if you work as employee at company and personal projects with free at home.

With xcode project the customer is not using Unity to author anything or does not even need to accept its license. They also can not modify the game at all. It's complete different thing and is not about mixing licenses or borrowing Unity license as they buy the final product.

 

It was explained well that users are not allowed to mix Unity Pro and Free licences while working on a project, and that makes sense, but I am abel to work on my game here in this company and the machine that has the licence.

It comes down to the essence of the problem.. is 1 abel to develop a game under someone else's licence and publish it under its own name, and it seems to be possible if the company just sells the final xcode project, right? At least thats what I understand from reading this thread.

 

In the xcode case you linked there is only one Unity user/license holder, the guy who makes the xcode output out of his Unity project. You are allowed to make an Unity game for other company and let them sell or publish it under their name. It's common on mobile platforms to use customers signing certificates or to build xcode output for them to do rest of the publish themselves using just xcode.

Key thing is that if there are two Unity licenses holders working on same project and one has pro, then both must have pro as license mixing not allowed. In your case it's you and the company you are working at.

 

Here is one solution that hasn't been proposed, although it is less for practical application and more for theory.

You could always skirt around the pro license by building game tools for other developers, as long as their needs don't require Unity itself. Then have one user who works excluslively with Unity, and that is their job to link content with the game. They wouldn't be using Unity, they'd be using a tool you built using Unity. Might require a lot of extra work, but at the same time you'd have the power of the engine itself (which unless I'm mistaken, the editor is made using Unity and its very own GUI system.

It's no different than someone using Unity as a tool for their own game engine.

I could be wrong, but I'm almost certain that would be abiding by all rules, laws, and regulation. Only one user would be using Unity Pro, and every other user would be using tools which you own, built with Unity Pro. It's just a matter of figuring out if building those tools is worth it.

 

Good question.

What about selling Unity projects to other companies? That is an interesting thing. What if a developer worked 80% on a game, then went bankrupt. Can they sell their unity project at all? What are the requirements?

Now, what if indeed someone sold you all the work for $1? My guess is you'd be more at risk for violating some kind of business laws that may exist to prevent this time of circumventing, which can be more dangerous than violating Unity. The last thing one would want to do is get caught accidentally circumventing their nation's serious business laws.

If no such laws exist, then it sounds like it might be a way to legally skirt around the agreement. I'm sure there are many ways to do this. The real question is, "Is it right?" Which is something no one here should discuss. End of that topic.

Anyway, as I just said I'm sure theres many ways to dance around the legal system to win out in this way. You'd probably need a lawyer to figure it out though, unless you don't find reading legalese boring.

 

I do.

They're $50 bucks apiece.

If you got a problem with that, we can fight right now. Meet me at Danny's Irish Pub on Main St at 1:42am. Come alone.

 

The Hippo bends down until he is eye level with his desk. He can see many things from here: the reflection on the wood. A joypad. A mouse. A keyboard. The glow from the monitor. A single cat hair. But one thing catches his eye: it's dust. A thin layer of dust collecting in the curve of his lock thread button. He blows it gently, and the dust scatters in the light of the lcd.

Could it be time? he wonders.

 

sure you can sell the project code. But the buyer would still need their own unity pro license which is what this thread was about. Hippo, you blew thread lock dust right in my eye.

 

I would say that would be a question for the company you work for. Not Unity. Since they actually paid for the license, and they are ok with you doing personal work on their system. Then who is it for Unity to say?

 

It comes down to the mixing free and pro, right? As has been mentioned, you can sell the output from Pro to people who don't have Unity, as long as they aren't using Unity themselves.

What the OP is talking about is (by my interpretation) making a game that needs a Pro feature and, to access that Pro feature, doing the final build on someone else's Pro seat after working on it on a non-Pro license.

 

Yes, it depends on how he "builds" his game. If he only uses pro, but its he employers license, then that is between him and his employers. If he is doing as what you say, then yes violation.