"Does buying Unity 5.0 Pro entitle me to all 5.x releases?
Yes, you will receive for free the updates in the Unity 5.x release cycle."
This was the original FAQ when I bought Unity 5 perpetual licenses. If support for my license will stop on March 2017 and there will be no Unity 6 on that date does that mean that Unity will not honour what has been promised to us? If that is the case I will not trust to anything this company says anymore…
The march 2017 date has been there for long time, since last year at least or probably since launch.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150217045559/http://unity3d.com/unity/faq/2497
Can’t find it, do you have a link?
No, but there were also threads about it several times, like in January
So basically the info about this in on this page: https://store.unity3d.com/perpetual
I don’t recall to have seen this info when I was preordering Unity 5. They should just release Unity 6 in March 2017 to not create any confusion and say that Unity 6 is only subscription based.
Yep I never saw it either during pre-order.
The key words there are “Unity 5.x release cycle”. On whatever date they decide that release cycle is over then you will no longer get free updates on your license. It sounds like that release cycle is over on March 2017.
Have they ever announced the exact date a release cycle would stop receiving updates before or as soon as it came out?
I’m no lawyer but I suspect FAQ are not legally binding.
No. Unity will not honour the FAQ. They have pretty clearly stated that all perpetual license holders will cease getting updates from march 2017.
It would be pretty hard to argue that you brought the perpetual license with the expectation of getting updates forever. None of the previous versions of Unity have included getting updates forever. You might be able to successfully convince a court that you expected another year of updates. Go see a lawyer, there are enough noisy users on the forum that you might have enough upset people for class action. But at best you could likely only get a partial refund. Probably not worth a lawyers time.
Sure, but that’s not what’s being asked about. All that’s being asked about is the 5.x release cycle, and right now it’s pretty muddy as to what that means.
I agree that Unity should change the name to 6 some time next year even if the only major change is the licensing. Unfortunately in one of the recent blog posts it was clearly stated that there would be no major release of Unity 6. So I have to agree it’s pretty confusing as to what’s going on here.
In my country products have to match descriptions given or promises made.
Yeah, I’m flipping back and forth on this one. Changing the version number to 6.0 when the new license starts would be a very good idea.
This. An official FAQ would be legally binding in NZ.
In my experience (NZ) it really comes down to what the person buying the product was led to believe. You might have had a reasonable expectation that the 5.X cycle would continue for some time. The 4.X cycle lasted about three and a half years. (Launched in Nov 2012, last update in May 2016). Updates on 4.X continued for a while, even after 5.X was released. Based on this one could reasonably expect the 5.X cycle to last about as long. It started March 2015, Unity 6.X would probably be released near the start of 2018. And the final release for the 4.x cycle might be expected somewhere around the end of 2018.
Of course typically (in NZ again) the seller is only required to make the product meet its promise or refund your purchase price. So the most Unity could be liable for would be the original price of the pro license. Any competent lawyer on the Unity side could argue that much of the promise was in the usable software, which is still usable without updates. And the updates did last a significant portion of the time. And the end of the cycle is on the website.
Put all of that together and Unity might only have to refund a small portion of the perpetual fee. Which means to cover the cost of pursuing this you would have to have a massive number of people. Combine that with the fact that you would have to do this on a country by country basis, as I understand it US consumer protection laws are very weak.
All this brings me back too:
So while Unity’s licensing practices around this are possibly illegal and probably unethical*, I don’t know that there is actually anything relevant that can be done about it.
*I believe I used the same terms to describe the 5.X pre ordering system. Seems Unity has a bad habit of getting excited about new licensing models and ignoring their obligations.
Well, surely they are not going to call it Unity 5 for ever, surely it will become just Unity at some point… right? Like they mean that Unity 6 is not going to be a significant release, not that we’ll have Unity 5.9999994332.
Everyone else seems to be using 10 these days as a starting point. Though I’m also in favor of the pattern started by Linux distributions where the date is used for versioning (eg 9.04 being April 2009).
They say: “…no major Unity 6 release”, and later refer to the “major release model”. I read that to mean that when Unity 6 is released, it wouldn’t be a major release, meaning a ton of new features all at once, like 5. I’m guessing that Unity 6 will be released around that date, just nothing radically different (feature wise). But yea, not super clear.
Its versioning, not decimal. You can quite easily go 5.8, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11, 5.12 and so on.
Only to a certain point, then it starts to lose precision. 
So am I, but would it work at UT’s pace? 
No more than one monthly real release named as such, the rest being p-versions (patches) would keep the versioning simple and understandable.
Given that 5.4 is still in beta (i.e. not released), I’m thinking it would work. And even before, there was some time between each of minor number releases (4.3, 4.4 and so on), even after Unity got faster in terms of updates after 5.0 (which as we know didn’t end well, RIP stability).
I don’t think they plan on honoring it because in their blog post (Unity Blog) they said:[quote]
With this in mind, we want to be clear. There will be no major Unity 6 release.
[/quote]
