Unity Heads - Caveats of license changes..need clarity(title changed to prove it's a serious thread)

Could you please explain the point 5.3 from the EULA?

Source: http://unity3d.com/legal/eula

 

And what if this e-mail from unity is lost (was missed or filtered out as a spam) and I can't reply because I didn't see it?

 

When was the decicision made to go free with unity 5?. And how much money did unity take, without Full Disclosure? How many months? Did they know before.. they took my money? Without telling me it was going to be free?? I am very uncomfortable with this notion!

 

simple..Unity 'baited' me with new features. with price tag..then 'switched..to the same features With out a price tag..
without giving me the choice..that's is what is wrong.. just a very bad feeling..that I can not get more than last months subscription back..I made a mistake..and it will infuence what I spend and where...lets just forget it.

 

You have a change to request refund if you are not happy. No one tried to bait or scam anyone.

 

The entire point of licence mixing restriction, is to stop teams buying one pro licence for their release builds, while all the work is done in free versions. Pro User A can still work legitimately with Personal User B, so long as Pro User A doesn't do the final build that goes to market.

 

Why though?

since all the pro features are now in personal, isn't the incentive to do this just gone?

 

Splash screen removal

 

Services that are provided.
It is up to the person to decide if they want all the extra stuff.

 

that's a tiny and utterly irrelevant thing, why would anyone care about that?

 

people care about less...

 

For starters, I suggest asking the many people around here who seem to care very much about exactly that.

Secondly, it's not the only thing. There's also the services, which would cost Unity some amount on their end to run.

 

we're talking about 1500 per head of the development team. It's not such a tiny issue when money is involved. People fret over whether or not to buy asset store items for their project. At that kind of cost tier, you learn to let the little things go

these are outwith the client, though. Are they really relevant in the situation of one persoin with pro handling the building of a project?

 

If I, as a Personal user, were contracted to e.g. upgrade a company's Unity project to version 5, they would have to also buy a copy of Pro for me to use or inherit the Personal splash screen like some sort of STD?

 

Keep in mind, the release of all the features in pro personal is a recent development, while all the supporting documentation/eula is out of date, and based on previous versions of Unity, where it did matter if people mixed pro/free licences.

 

A quick question. I hired a Level Designer who is working with Unity Free. Does this mean i cannot use his art/terrain/project while on a Pro License without reverting back to free ?

 

bit of a gray area that one. Thing is, you can buy assets from the asset store which are made with free and use them in your pro version.

(I assume you're allowed to release assets using free - never actually looked into it)

 

That's kind of what I was asking at the bottom of the other page (if the tagging extended to Scene / Prefab / Package level), but it seems to have been passed over...

 

Ok this is a bit messy.

Can i use my pro license on a personal project as long as i don't make the final build, but someone with the personal edition makes the build with the splash screen? I mean thats the only difference.... Would be annoying to pay 1500 dollars and then have to switch between license files lol

I mean i am only staying pro at the moment to support Unity, as i dont really need anything in the pro version at the moment. But i am NOT gonna pay if it makes my life harder.

 

I didn't see a definitive answer to this question. If a project has been created or modified by a Personal user, Pro will apparently switch to Personal, but does that include yourself if you upgrade from Personal to Pro and open one of your old projects created in Personal? Does Unity recognize that the Personal user who created the project (you) has now upgraded to Pro and then remove the restrictions accordingly?

 

Thanks for the reply. But my question is if our Pro license will revert back to Personal. The level-designer we currently have under contract is working on a new map, placing trees/stones/vegetations he created. So i'll have to open his scene and import the Terrain/placed Objects and import it to our game scene. If that doesn't work it basically means we can no longer work with freelancers who do not have a Pro license. Please clarify.

 

That contradicts what Graham has been saying in this thread. It is very confusing.

 

I don't feel like anyone (Community members, Graham, Aurore, etc) should even be entertaining any of these questions. These are all legal questions that if handled incorrectly could result in a lawsuit, loss of licenses, whatever. Headache, basically. Just give us a link to your legal team so we can contact them directly and get answers that we can quote in court. If we take a print-out of a forum to court we're going to get laughed at (though it will likely hold up, it's way more of a pain). Those of us that have registered business entities that are dealing with a mixture of licenses need straight, clear answers. Zero contradictions. Don't mess around with this kind of stuff.

 

Aurore appeared to say the opposite earlier in this thread, and her view seems to be supported by the section of the EULA I quoted even earlier in the thread (which was from a quote from a post by Aurore in another thread) "We permit individuals to collaborate with or license content to third parties regardless of version".

 

That's a pretty standard clause in case anything hinges on the income of another company.

It's basically in the case where, you release your game with personal, the internet explodes you are at the top of the charts everywhere, then Unity sends you a mail saying something like "maybe you should buy pro now?" and you reply "No, actually I only made 5$". It's a last resort thing, because I don't think they really want to start sending people around the world to start checking other people's finances without a really good reason.

 

You are quoting from the summary. It says "you develop" on both sides. My question was about third party content.

The detail in Section 2, subsection 1, part (b) says "any user of the Software may use content licensed from third parties regardless of the version of the Software that was used to develop such third party content".

Getting a legal advisor to contact your legal team is only really an option for those who can afford Professional. And would have to be repeated many times by many developers. It would be better if your legal team posted here, and we were told if the content licensed from third parties will be tagged with an identifier.

 

Hello,
thanks for the reply Graham. I think you should reconsider that policy. In our case the level-designer was previously working with CryEngine 3, his income is definitely below 100k. I would hate to fire him and look for someone else "just" because it's not allowed that a 3rd party we have a contract with is using the wrong version. If you guys insist on this policy you should at least provide us a way to find the right contacts (in it's simplest form just a Freelancer Forum for PRO-Only). His job is to place objects on terrain, now instead of providing a scene that i just copy+paste maybe he can create prefabs of the root-gameobjects plus make an unitypackage for the terrain - but it's some overhead.I definitly don't want to change the designer, been looking for that talent quite a while.

I also wouldn't have a problem to buy a 2nd Unity license that can be transferred to him for the duration of the contract. We need some solution there, for in-house the EULA is pretty clear, but when working with freelancers this is kinda messy.

 

I think that might be a good idea, sans the extra legal team. Personally, rather than posting here where there's all this noise, I'd contact your support team describing my use case and asking what license purchases are required. That's way easier than a noisy conversation about the interpretation of the EULA, and gets a direct yes/no/here's-what-you-need-to-purchase answer straight from the horse's mouth.

I wouldn't get myself a legal rep just to ask that for me. They'd get the same answer, and charge to have the conversation!

 

Yep. That's just what you have to do. Or legitimately learn law yourself and represent yourself. If you plan on making money on your game/software you need to have a legally registered business entity for tax purposes and whatnot. Creating a legal entity without any kind of consultation could find yourself losing your house cause your business went bankrupt! Yikes! So yes, you'll get charged. Working as intended, unfortunately.

 

The user license ought to be clear enough that new Unity users don't have to hire a lawyer to use the software in very commonplace ways. Failing that, some clarification in a public place like this would be very helpful. I would think it's in everyone's best interest to minimize casual licensing mistakes made out of confusion.

 

Honestly, what should happen is Unity should hire lawyers to rephrase their EULA. The end.

 

Er... no, that's not what I was talking about. This isn't about a legal entity, it's about a legal advisor. I was purely saying that I wouldn't get my lawyer to ask that question on my behalf. They'll* charge for you to talk to them, then for them to read the EULA in question, then for them to talk to Unity's legal team, then for them to tell you the answer, which will be the same either way.

Under no circumstances should you need a lawyer to interpret the answer to "Our working arrangement looks like X and our current projects target Y, how many of which licenses do I have to purchase?"

* To be fair, a lawyer has done a few bits and pieces for me over the past year related to game dev stuff and hasn't charged a cent, even though he certainly could have. So if you've got one of those around then by all means make the most of their assistance.

 

Oh. Ya I totally agree with you there. I didn't understand what you meant before.
+1

 

So can someone tell me if our freelancer can upgrade his license to Pro instead on his work-in-progress project ? He started working on the game-world 2 weeks ago using Personal, as far as i know i cannot import it to our Pro Version without getting the Splash/downgrading to Personal.

 

WRONG!!!!!!!!!
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Hello Patrick,

Your subscription isn't eligible for cancellation until July 2015. If you have any questions please contact subscription@unity3d.com.

Cheers,
Ryane
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Really!

You will give refunds to someone who paid upfront..but not me..

From my point of view..just wrong..

 

Subscriptions last for a year. What are you trying to state here ForceVFX?
If you did the subscription, it was there when you clicked the button to do it that it was a lock in for 12 months.

 

I think that he's raising it in the context that, just like people who pre-ordered 5 Pro, he also didn't know what the feature split would be when he agreed to pay for something. Now the features he needed are free and he's paying for a bunch of stuff he's not interested in.

Of course, the quoted email doesn't say why the sub isn't eligible for a refund, so that could be beside the point. It could be that more than half of the minimum period had been used by the time the feature split announcement/release happened anyway.

 

Then that makes sense.
Doing a blanket statement without having info makes it very difficult to figure it out.