Unity's Open-Source Double Standard: The Ban of VLC

Summary

VLC for Unity integration For the readers unaware, we started distributing binaries on the Unity Store for the open-source VLC for Unity integration back in December 2019. The integration essentially was a bridge between the Unity game engine and the VLC multimedia engine, allowing to build your own media-player based on VLC technology in Unity-based games. Both Unity, through Mono, and LibVLC are highly portable so this is a compelling argument for this cross-platform integration. Since the start, we have had many users downloading the assets from the Unity Store for their Unity apps and games when requiring demanding multimedia solutions. We had 3 assets targeting specific platforms: Unity Store ban This all changed at the end of the summer 2023 when Unity emailed us the following: And just like this, our publisher account was instantly banned. After months of slow back-and-forth over email trying to find a compromise, including offering to exclude LGPL code from the assets, Unity basically told us we were not welcome back to their Store, ever. Even if we were to remove all LGPL code from the Unity package. Where it gets fun is that there are currently hundreds if not thousands of Unity assets that include LGPL dependencies (such as FFmpeg) in the Store right now. Enforcement is seemingly totally random, unless you get reported by someone, apparently. It gets better… 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). Full list of open-source Unity dependencies here. So Unity gets to use and benefit from LGPL open-source libraries, games built with Unity depend on LGPL code by default (hello glibc!), but publishers and Unity users are not allowed to do so through the Unity Store? If you are a company requiring multimedia products or consulting for your own projects, this store will be of interest to you. Afte...