Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a “Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement.” This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, “Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least).” Unity is swiftly coming to it’s demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
So you’re suggesting him to:
Drop out of his job (which you may not know).
Stop earning an amount of money that, may or may not be utterly necessary to keep his lifestyle (which you may not know).
Spend months or years learning a new technology, meanwhile unemployed or with a job that may or may not sustain his previous expenses (expenses which you may not know).
Re-make every single project that he owns to a new platform while adapting every single thing to a new environment, meanwhile solving a waterfall of bugs and refactoring problems, ultimately consuming hundreds of hours (bugs which you may not know).
After living miserably for a while, hunt for companies that somehow are using an open source tool that, most of the time, won’t tick all the boxes a company needs from a tool (companies and boxes which you don’t know).
Miraculously find such company and, miraculously rise to a position high enough that you can make a decision which changes the whole core of the development team, impacts licensing for other tools, new hires, compatibilities, and god knows what more down the line (changes which you may not know).
You’re suggesting that he goes down years of an even more uncertain path… just because you feel like It? To me It sounds like an Evil person’s plan. How can you be so assertive saying something which you may not know about? Jesus
If he cares about his career as a game developer then he’ll have to learn Godot and start porting his games to that platform if he wants to be in control of his games.
If you think any of that is an absurd and unrealistic extreme, then you are part of the problem.
Doing what’s right requires sacrifices and sometimes in life, we have to make those sacrifices not only for morality’s sake but for our own. He will lose everything if he doesn’t do what you’re suggesting.
Sorry, but life is like that sometimes. You’re not meant to be comfortable all the time, you’re meant to be strong, and that means sometimes you will have to get a second job to do the things you want to do.
Change isn’t going to just fall into your lap.