Open-source game - legal advice

Unity Engine
1

Hello,
I need a legal advice regarding Unity License. As an university project we created a therapeutic game for authistic children, in cooperation with Institute for Child Development. The game is open-sourced in order to be free and available for everyone and forever.

It is one of four application created in cooperation with the institute and the rest of the applications are published on Google Store, so they could be downloaded easily by parents or other therapeutic institutions. Unfortunately, our game can’t be published by the university, because it is not allowed to use unity personal edition, as it exceeds annual $100,000.

The University already have Unity Pro license, but lacks Android Pro license. We are currently looking for sponsors, and contacted even our regional Unity Account Manager, however did not get any response.

But here comes my question: how the project can be developed further? Could random developers contribute to our project, using their Unity Personal Edition? Could such an open-source game be published by university, if it had appropriate licenses?

Maybe there is a way our university could publish the game for free, as it is strictly non commercial project?

Thanks,

If someone would like to know something more about project: GitHub - Motoryka/FriendlyLines: Open-Sourced 2D therapeutic game for autistic children, which goal is acceleration of development of fine motor skills

2

Well for starters, if the project was loaded into Unity Pro, Unity Free can’t work on it. However, this is definitely not a question for the forums. Legal advice should never be asked on a public forum. You need to contact the Unity team directly and they’ll work with you on getting this resolved.

1 Like
3

I tried, but did not get any response, so I try with the community.

4

You can certainly ask, and we can certainly answer, but a forum discussion won’t hold up in court.

5

Caveat: I’m not a lawyer!

If you see the FAQ, there’s this piece of information:

That seems to me like you can have an open source community work with the the project - they can use Personal, the University can use their Uni license, and it’d all be fine and dandy.

Where this breaks down is in distribution. The way I read things, the open source community should be able to create Android builds just fine (based on the above), but if the University creates builds based on exactly the same source, and then distributes it, that’d be in breach of the terms.

So… I don’t know? You really need to get in touch with Unity. Bug them. Try to get in touch through the “Serious Games” section.

If you manage to get in touch with an actual person in Unity, I’m sure they’ll give you whatever licenses you need, no problem. This is a great cause, and a not-for-profit project. You just have to get through to a human first :p[/Quote]