Will it be available in Unity Free ?

I currently don't own a Unity pro license and I want to know if it is worth trying this new system out now or if I won't have access to it when 4.6 is officially released.
The only information I was able to find on this topic is in Beta 17 changelog :

• "Graphics: Stencil buffer is now available in Unity Free."

Does this mean the Unity free will offer access to part of the system ?

 

Yes, the UI tools are and will be available in Free. Unity has said this a few times in various places.

 

Thank you for you reply!

Not that I mean to doubt you, but would you have any of those sources ?

I need to convince my colleague that it is safe to start building our GUI with it.

 

The Unite Key Note 2014 and the UI video on Unity's youtube has this information.

 

They do say that the UI components source will be available to anyone, but can we safely assume that the system itself in Unity's editor will be fully available in Unity Free licence?

 

@rootsweb You can safely say that the system is free since they are open sourcing it and its all written in C#.

Don't worry man, it will all be free and devs like myself and other that like UI will make pull requests to their repo to make it even better, the positive of open source.

 

The reason they made the stencil buffer available to Free is they need the stencil buffer for masking in the UI and that is a Free feature. Otherwise they would have had to restrict masking to Pro which would have then rendered scroll rects almost useless and therefore made any builtin scrolling a Pro feature, which would have been dumb.

 

People would have gone torches and pitchforks on the Unity HQ if it was Pro only

 

Well, I may have been using Unity for only a couple of weeks, but even for me it's fairly obvious that their split between Free/Pro has nothing to do with it being some sort of "demo" version. They want to sell Pro licenses, yes, but just look at how little is actually in the Pro version numerically: The features that are Pro-only are absolutely non-essential to making a game, but they are essential to making a "pro" game. In essence it's actually a great name, because it represents it: You get the pro version when you become a pro (as in, you're making games that actually produce money).

I figure the two biggest sources of their income are big-studio licenses (like 50+ seats kind of thing) and the Asset Store. Just look at how much you can get off the asset store for barely a fifth of the pro license.

So yeah, it's kind of silly to worry about them making a stupid decision like that, because what they're doing is managing a stable-over-time business model, not trying to put up some sort of "paywall". They don't *need* to force somebody with little-to-no actual income to buy pro when they can get them to buy little stuff off the Asset Store over time. And if you already are making enough money that the sub fee or license fee don't seem like an insurmountable goal, then you're just going to get that sub/license anyway just so life is easier.

 

Not to mention all of the free tech support, beta testing, and content generation that having a free model gets them. I'd have probably paid for pro a dozen times over if I charged my hourly rate back to Unity Answers.

 

Thank you all for your input, it makes sense now that I have a clearer view of the big picture.
Let's starting building this awesome GUI