Killing Team Cooperation and Freelancers: impossible to work with different subscriptions plans.

Wow, lots of replies!

I don't work in the Legal or Licensing team so I don't have all the answers about these things. Just trying to help out as much as I possibly can!

I have emailed the Legal team about possibly updating the EULA to have more information on how the mix of licensing affects contractors/freelancers. I will also now contact them again, linking to this thread, to see if someone can jump in and answer some questions.

 

The asset store is completely in the clear. You develop a tool as a third party. Someone else downloads and uses that tool. That's fine.

The confusion comes when you want someone else to work on the intimate guts of a project while you are.

 

One could also make the majority of the game using matching Free licenses, and then at the very end buy 1 pro license & have that person publish alone. (Everyone else stopped working bc their licenses dont match anymore, but fortunately they already finished their job).

That is, if you dont need some/many of the features, such as simply wanting to remove the embarassing splash screen.

Probably more ways around this, while still abiding by the rules & law.

Also ppl may want to look up laws on EULA & how they function when multiple separate companies are involved. And if the freelancer lies & says they have pro, I assume the developer is not responsible since they not responsible for the actions of another group (unless they are).

Honestly though? I'm no lawyer, but I would NOT be surprised if Unity's EULA, if it ever came to a court room, was thrown out bc a judge ruled you CAN mix licenses. After all, it's not up to Unity to make that final decision, it's the court's. And every country has its own laws too.

So just a friendly reminder: EULA is NOT LAW. Far far from it. And UT seem like the type who just want to be paid fairly (not the type who would go after small enthusiasts with monster lawsuits).

So in practical application, this seems to me to be a way for Unity to protect itself legally, even if it's impossible to enforce, just so they can say to developers "Please, be fair to us. We need to be paid to continue our work." while silently knowing the practicality that this will be violated constantly, as a few ppl have stated theyve seen before. which IMO is fair indeed, bc Unity & Developers need to both be fair & practical. Just pay for hard work, without penny pinching.

TLDR; It's good they're updating this. It really isn't clear at all.

 

Very much this. I had one contract provision with one employer that fell into this category. They reminded me of it at one stage. I stated I had no intention of keeping it, if they wanted to enforce it that it would have to go through the courts. A few days latter I got a letter officially releasing me from the provision. Which was probably to prevent me from going to the courts claiming the provision was illegal. Not that I intended too, but sometimes threats are needed to keep companies in line.

I think its clear. I just don't think anyone likes the clear answer, and the clear answer isn't how Unity intended things to be.

 

The fact is, that not always having a single Pro/Plus license and several Personal licenses working on the same project is actually "Abusing" the system.

In small teams, there may be only a programmer, and others may just be different kind of artists who for simplicity's sake need to just be able to interact with the project adding or tweaking the content they're related to (eg: level designer) or just test it. So, unless it's something really profitable, they may just need a Personal license. They have their own costly software to pay for as well.

The "sealed cells" subscription model shouldn't hinder emerging users, small teams, freelancers, and indie devs, in my opinion.

I'm looking forward a clarification of the EULA in that direction.

 

Profitability, amount of use or other software requirements are irrelevant. If you're going to use it at all then you should be doing so by the correct license.

 

I respect your opinion.
I think that a texture artist wouldn't probably want to own a Pro license for a contract job just to be able to collaborate, since he wouldn't be using most of the product features.
And game devs owning a Pro license may have a hard time in finding a freelance texture artist owning a Pro license.

Yet, I'm not questioning the fact we should stick to the terms of use or not, I'm just speaking my mind about what I'd consider to be fair.

As soon as the correct interpretation is cleared up about the EULA, Unity itself will be able to determine whether users actually like it or not, just by looking at their selling stats.

 

If you're picking and choosing what license terms to abide by then you're not obeying the license, you're pretending to obey the license. And if those tasks really are so trivial then just hand them over to someone who does have a license.

 

Again, I only wrote what I'd consider to be fair. I'm not questioning the rules, and I'm not cherry-picking among them. And I never implied "some tasks" are trivial. That's really not the point of this topic.

I'm basically saying that if someone doesn't like the EULA, it should be probably choosing another engine.
I think Unity is going to provide a reasonable clarification about the EULA, a fair agreement among the parties, trying to please as many people as possible, profit-wise and abuse-proof-wise.

 

You don't have to have a license if you don't use unity. A modeler or sound person or texture artist is not required to have a license just because it is going into a unity project. If they don't touch unity they are fine. If they do use unity as part of the project, it needs to match licenses, no matter how little they use it.

 

I doubt it. The current solution works well for Unity, and provides confusion for a very small number of users. The freelance remote set up where problems occur is not the industry norm.

It's worth noting the asset store lisence is also horrible for the remote freelance set up.

 

Great post. Sums up how I feel too.

 

Obeying? Pretending?

This is childish nonsense.

The reality is business, fairness, and practical application.

It is not practical to require or expect small teams with low budgets to pay full licensing fees when only one needs a Pro license & all others barely need to use even Unity free.

You're in essence just encouraging people to ignore the EULA (and do it anyway) or to go out of their way and spend precious dev time altering their asset pipeline, or to find legal ways around it (honor the law, but not the spirit of the law).

All for what? Penny pinching enthusiasts? Squeezing small business that struggle to gain stability in a competitive market? Limiting the number of successful projects or scaring off potential customers (both of which hurt Unity far more)?

Or for some asinine conventional "be a good citizen" morality in a cut-throat world where those rich or smart enough to bend or break the rules dominate?

Practicality & being Fair to demanding consumers is as vital to Unity as it is to the consumers themselves. In fact, it's more important for Unity because talented developers can always go elsewhere. Unity has to stick with Unity.

 

One thing that would be nice was some sort of provision allowing those eligible to use lower lisence tiers to intergrate content.

Currently I am eligible to use personal, plus, or pro. I have chosen to use plus, however that limits my ability to collaborate with personal users. Even though technically I can use personal.

A clarification on this point would be easy to make, and would clear up some of the edge cases here.

 

@aliceingameland talked about the spirit and intentions behind the Eula, stating that that part about the mixed licensing has been written to prevent abuses from companies and definitely not to be of any hindrance to freelancers.

Since the legal team has been said to have been contacted several times in this thread, to work on a better wording for the EULA in the future, and the fact that I've been said this particular topic has already been treated countless times in months may suggest otherwise. Anyway you're free to doubt it.

Rules are rules and we're all going to obey to them. Anyway I still want to believe Unity has still some consideration for their user's feedback, offering a fair distinction between employees working for a company, and a freelance with arbitrary skills.

Asking a level designer to buy a Pro license with 1 year of commitment just to work on a well paid small project (which may be using Unity Plus in its team) is just like (it's just a comparison, don't be picky) pretending a Photoshop user on contract job to draw a cover, to pay for the whole Adobe Suite, just because someone in the team needed all the programs.

 

I still fee like there could be a middle ground here. Right now, the scale is tipped quite heavily against contractors doing code work. It doesn't seem to fit very well with the "democratizing game development" mantra. Could be I just don't know enough about it. Honestly don't do much contracting work with coders.

If there were a way to get discounted "workstation licenses" that only pertained to a specific project or had some kind of time limit on it, that might make things a bit easier.

or this...

-------------------
I definitely see things from Unity's point of view. If all the contractors are using Personal and only the people they are working for are using pro, that's a lot of lost profit. But this seems like a place that could use some attention from the big thinkers at Unity. One of the things I love about Unity is that it brings the world of big-budget game development to hobby users and start-ups.

Does the personal license still not have the built-in version control integration like the Pro license has? Because you could argue that a team could all work on Personal license and then once they get past the threshold, pay their dues as required. I doubt someone hitting over $100k in sales is going to fret over paying for a few pro licenses.

 

<abusing mod abilities>

Could this be added as a premium service we could opt in to?