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
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when a company does something that shows it doesn’t have its customers’ best interests in mind, it’s imperative that it be immediately and wholly abandoned.
Companies have long since learned that we’ll ignore major red flags for the sake of convenience, and at this point they’re not even trying to hide the flags - they’re proudly flying them and laughing as we continue to give them business.
This is a good policy, but it’s not always that simple for people who have been making games on the engine. Many people have spent years of their lives working on projects using Unity, or have already released products using Unity which they are now supporting. Changing a project to another game engine is a massive undertaking, so Unity has a semi-captive consumer base in the short term.
This is the same reason oracle is still in business. AKA the ol’ trap and gouge.
Oh come on! They’re software developers! The code they wrote three years ago is total shit and you (we) know it, haha.
Take the time to learn something new, today. It’s practically what makes a software developer a software developer. If you’re not learning a new language, engine, or technique pretty regularly you’re going to have a hard time (eventually).
The reason why software developers reinvent the wheel so often is because we know that the old wheel is garbage. It at least, the way we used it was. After being a software dev for a few decades, looking at your old code should always give you a feeling of, “I could’ve done that better.”