Do i have to buy a seat for every freelancer i hire in my organization when i have Unity Plus?

Hi,

we have Unity Plus membership, and more often than not we have side projects with many freelancers, every time we try to add this new freelancer to a project, we get this error:
You need a Unity Teams Seat in order to enable Collaborate

and the only way to solve this is to assign a seat to that freelancer in our organization, despite manually adding him as a user/manager to the specific project.

The question:

* Is there a free-way to achieve this ? or is it mandatory for all organization member to have the same subscription as the organization owners ?

* The only work around i can think of is to create a new organization that uses the free version unity, which seems like an overkill for a simple feature.


Thanks

 

It’s mandatory.

This would break Unity’s EULA.

If you have a Unity subscription, everyone you work with on Unity needs to have the same subscription level (plus teams, plus asset store assets, even if they have site license -> since site means being on the same physical location), otherwise you break Unity’s EULA.

 

i see, thanks for the clarification.

 

So a question I have is this: If we get a freelancer for 2 weeks for our project, we have to buy a Unity Pro license subscription for the whole year? I mean... this makes very little sense compared to other subscription models!

 

Do you already have a subscription ?
if yes, then i guess the best way is to remove some from the seats and add the freelancers, but also you can pay monthly, why are you worried about paying a whole year ?

PS:
i think its better to just have the freelancer have his own unity plus subscription.

 

Because when you subscribe to Unity, you are committed for a whole year.

We have Pro licenses. We wanted to hire an audio guy and we wanted him to work directly on the editor for a couple of months. We don’t have extra licenses around, and Audio guy doesn’t do enough Unity work to be worth it for him to buy a license for himself and we didn’t want to pay an extra 1500$ Unity tax.

So it didn’t happen.

 

Devil's advocate here.

How would you, as a user, even enforce this? I've worked on multiple project where my client would hire freelancers that don't work on Unity enough to justify a plus/pro licence. I never met these guys some of which are in an other country.

If I hired them myself and ask about it, they could lie and I'd never know.

So I'm not sure how I could be responsible whatever EULA says about it.

 

In your first example, I guess the onus would be on the client to worry about this. If your and your client's licenses match, you are not responsible for other 3rd parties, I don't think, but IANAL.

In your second example, if you asked them and they lie, you have plausible deniability. As far as you know you did nothing wrong. But you need to ask them.

And you would ask, and I'm fairly certain they won't lie. But let's say a license mismatch happens anyway:

Unity used to mark assets in a project whether they belonged to a pro license project or a fee license project. (they don't anymore, but they probably just changed the way they do it)

So presumably, after you share your project and the freelancer opens it with the wrong license type, Unity could phone home and report that mismatch. If that happens a number of times (with back and forth of the project), Unity could be incentivized to investigate further.

Practically, they won't bother with small companies and freelancers, so there is probably not much to worry about.

BUT, I don't want to give ammo to Unity and open myself to the whims of a Unity employee that thinks that maybe he can sell a couple more Pro licenses by cold calling me about breaking the EULA.

AND, the problem here is that the EULA is ridiculous, they need to change it, it's problematic. I think Unity hired a lot of lawyers recently and they ran with it. The community saying "bah they will never enforce it anyway" and ignoring parts of it, is a problem and gives them ammo to do silly things. If we as a community think Unity's EULA (the Asset Store one is even crazier) is ridiculous and *bah, whatever, just ignore it*, THEN WE SHOULD ASK IT IS CHANGED AND BE LESS INSANE.

So, personally, I take EULAs very seriously, it doesn't matter if they enforce it or not (if they don't enforce it they should change it). If they prohibit me from doing things, I can't do them. For that reason we have banned using the Asset Store any more. If these things pile up and it becomes unmanageable, we'll just not use Unity any more.

Unity is not our friend. Individually many great people work there, all the developers and other employees I have met or simply interacted with are talented and pleasant people. But somehow, after you get all the vectors from all factors, weight them and sum them up, Unity as a whole is not a friendly entity and should be treated as such.