[Legal] Clarification around modified Unity Companion License code?

[burningmime]

I just had an asset I spent 4+ months working on rejected for this…

You have assets in your package which require attribution or cannot be resold. Please remove such assets from the package before submitting it to the Asset Store. Any licenses that require a product to maintain open-sourced or limit usability in commercial products such as GNU/GPL Mozilla Public License, or any Creative Commons that requires attribution (CC-BY) will not be allowed. Please reach out to Unity Asset Store Submission Guidelines - Asset Store, Section 1.2.e)

My only thought is that a big piece of it uses some restructured/modified code from ECS and Unity Physics (moved into local namespaces). I made modifications to the codebase; it’s not the same code (it’s basically a modified subset of functionality), however the original is licensed under the Unity Companion License. I’m assuming it somehow runs afoul of this part (since the rejection letter has no other communications besides a canned copy-paste, I can only make guesses…):

1. Unity Companion Use. Exercise of the license granted herein is permitted as long as it is in connection with the authoring and/or distribution of applications, software, or other content under a valid Unity content authoring and rendering engine software license (“Engine License”). That means, for example, as long as you authored content using the Work under an Engine License, you may distribute the Work in connection with that content as you see fit under this License. No other exercise of the license granted herein is permitted, and in no event may the Work be used for competitive analysis or to develop a competing product or service,

I can maybe find workarounds or rewrite the code, but I feel like if the UCL is incompatible with the asset store EULA, there should be a massive flashing red banner above it.

(Note I’m not attempting to redistribute Unity code; the modified piece is like 5% of my package; some of my package needed access to algorithms that were not public in the official ECS or Unity Physics.)

[halley]

UCL3.2

3.2 Unity owns its content. While you keep all right, title, and interest to your own content per the above, as between Unity and you, Unity will own all right, title, and interest to all intellectual property rights (including patent, trademark, and copyright) in the Work and derivative works of the Work, and you hereby assign and agree to assign all such rights in those derivative works to Unity.

I take the combination of 1 and 3.2 to mean “You can compile your derivative work into an executable and distribute that, but you can’t sell a derivative work as source code on the marketplace since that would mean there’s two owners.”

As usual, IANAL, IANYL, YMMV.

[CodeSmile]

Just to be sure: do a text search across ALL files under /Assets for keywords like “GPL”, “CC-BY”, “Mozilla” and any other licenses you know are either copyleft or require attribution. It may just be one little icon that you forgot about. Or that stackoverflow code snippet that you attributed with a link but didn’t consider that, yes, unfortunately so, is CC-BY licensed.

But for sure, the UCL means you cannot resell Unity’s own code.

Anyhow, you won’t find massive red banners across any license. That’s what the license texts are for. Though personally I would say if one license deserves that red banner, it would be GPL. Followed by stackoverflow or any CC-BY license (but only if you’re an asset dev).

[burningmime]

@CodeSmile

But for sure, the UCL means you cannot resell Unity’s own code.

I am not attempting to do so. I thought it would be rude/invasive to add a dependency on an experimental preview package in the Asset Store package when I am only using a tiny fraction of the functionality. Just installing ECS adds runtime overhead per frame (and a ton of extra menu options). The only piece I needed were BlobAssets and MeshColliders, so I took those out and made it internal.

The alternative I guess is to switch to requiring 2022+ and adding a dependency on ECS. Although those packages are still hidden from the package manager UI, even on 2022+, so Unity clearly does not consider them API stable.

[burningmime]

@halley1

UCL3.2

I take the combination of 1 and 3.2 to mean “You can compile your derivative work into an executable and distribute that, but you can’t sell a derivative work as source code on the marketplace since that would mean there’s two owners.”

As usual, IANAL, IANYL, YMMV.

I understand; but if this is the case, it should be made clear they are not compatible in one or the other license. “UCL” could be added to the Asset store requirement right next to “GPL” as a no-n0 license. Or else, the UCL could specify that modified versions of it cannot be sold on the Asset Store.

Unity maintains both the UCL and the Asset Store requirements. This is not a third-party license; there does not need to be any ambiguity.