What a bunch of maroons. 99.9% chance someone else mirrored that git repo.
EDIT: And this is yet another reason everyone, everywhere, should immediately mirror any git repo for a project they are even remotely interested in.
github giveth, and github can (and does) taketh away. Say NO to centralized source management platforms – exactly the antithesis of what git was designed for in the first place!
Say NO to centralized source management platforms
True, maybe, but in this case entirely pointless. If Unity didn’t host their repo on git, they would’ve hosted it on their own solution. They would’ve been able to delete the repo just the same. Furthermore, if they hosted the solution on their own, it would’ve made it harder for others to mirror the repo. At least harder as git makes it.
Fair enough… archive.is and other solutions then to capture their pages before/after changes.
github giveth, and github can (and does)
To be fair, this is a feature not a bug. The original creator is the one who taketh away.
True, generally. Unless DMCA notices force github to taketh away for them… :) youtube-dl and others found out.
I mean you’re not wrong but also that’s already done for us by the Wayback Machine.
But yeah this is major ignorant corporate Streisand-effecting. Basically openly admitting they don’t care about the ethics of their company.
Mirror a git repo? Do you understand how git works? You clone the repo, and it’s effectively mirrored already, especially for something that doesn’t change much.
If you want the commits updated, then put
git pullin a daily cronjob. Boom! Mirror.True, every git pull is a ‘mirror’. Bad phrasing on my part. I was thinking more of when I set up my local gogs instance to mirror an outside/upstream git (such as from github), which really is just their term for pulling again automatically every time upstream changes.
Enshittification… enshittification everywhere
Exactly, everyone seems to be jumping in the bandwagon these days. Makes me wonder if it was part of the plan from day one of the web 2.0.
The cheap money is gone. Now suddenly companies need to find profit to satisfy investors.
This isn’t far from the truth. I run a small business and I can assure you, making a profit in the last 3-4 years has been rough.
I hope shareholders like watching people jump ship.
part of the plan from day one of the web 2.0
Ah yes,
XMLHTTPRequest, the ultimate bait-and-switch.Yeah, gotta love people that have no clue taking phrases they don’t understand and applying them to non-technical conversation.
ooffff
Are they just hoping that literally no publisher will legally challenge these terms? You can’t just change the terms retroactively without consent and start charging people whatever you want. They’ll lose the instant someone takes them to court over it
Especially when there’s a lot of high profile clients who’s business literally relies on them. They will absolutely have a ton of lawsuits coming towards them. Good, fuck them for thinking they could, or should, ever do this.
I’m sure if this actually pushes through they’ll change the terms for those clients just to keep them happy (and paying what they do pay, which likely dwarfs all the smaller players). And they sure as shit won’t fight for the smaller creators when they get theirs.
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You can’t just change the terms retroactively without consent and start charging people whatever
They can, if you don’t like it you quit using their product that is the alternative they offer if you don’t like the new license. If you want to continue to using it you have to accept and pay. It is not illegal, they can change the conditions anytime, the initial conditions 100% said that already as most terms have.
Not saying it isn’t terrible tough to be clear.
EDIT: They
hated Jesusdownvoted the user because he told them the truth.You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.
At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.
Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:
Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.
Unity is now trying to erase copies of the old terms and claims that the new terms will retroactively affect everyone, which is in contradiction with this specific clause.
I agree that it seems like a problematic part. That said… even if devs are allowed to stay using that version, for a lot of devs is not practical, so the end result is basically the same, they cannot afford to stay on the old version and would need to pay to continue using it.
Except for old games not being updated or similar that they don’t need updates to the tools/engine.
You are right in terms of in-development and future games. But unity is also trying to enforce these terms on already released games. This could potentially bring a challenge to their subscription model, which essentially states you must continue to pay as long as your game is available. I don’t know much about the law, but I do know that there are legal limitations on how rented/subscribed products work. These limitations are to prevent straight up scams from stealing from you and making it technically legal with some fine print. Which isn’t too far off from what unity is doing now.
This is comparable to you renting a drill from someone to make a table. You agree to the terms that you must continue to pay a subscription as long as the table exists. Then unity drill co. decides you must also pay a fee every time someone sits at the table. Even though the table is already made, and you already had an agreement to pay for the drill you had previously used. Your only alternative is to destroy the table.
Just because the terms said they could modify the deal doesn’t mean they can force anything on you as if you had already agreed to it.
Isn’t this action (removal of the git repo) essentially an admission that:
- Unity is doing something shady;
- Unity knows it’s doing something shady;
- Unity knows when the public sees what they’re doing what they’re doing, it’ll be recognized as totally something shady?
Yes slim, it’s shady.
In this digital era, you’d have thought they would know that it would leave a trail. Of course, it’s a calculated risk.
But man, are they bad at math
A suspiciously wiped and cleaned trail is still a trail.
I’m already switching to Godot.
Here’s link to it, https://godotengine.org/
Well it’s good to know I don’t have to start from scratch. I’ll take a look, thanks!
If you have any sticking points, let me know, or post in the most popular Godot community and myself and other experienced peers will be more than happy to help!
Awesome thanks! I have some experience with Unity so I expect I should be able to pick up the basics fairly quickly. I’m currently slogging my way through a 10 hour intro to v4 on Youtube.
Pretty excited to start out with a new and open engine. Is there any way to extract my paid-for assets from Unity and use them in Godot?
Hmm, that isn’t something I have personally encountered. This tool looks promising even if it isn’t under development anymore, but it might be worth a shot.
Good luck “silently removing” a github repo. That shit don’t fly.
What’s with these companies going full-evil all of a sudden.
The infinite money dried up. Now they are out of ideas on how to make a profit because they werent before.
Also investors pushing for higher profit margins. Unity is publicly traded company.
and poor parsec just got bought by unity, definitely gonna go down with the ship for profit
So the companies “aren’t making enough money”, which means they don’t have enough to pay us, which means we don’t have enough to spend on them.
Hmm.
They only “don’t have enough to pay us” insofar as they don’t have enough to pay us without sacrificing record high profits or CEO salaries.
Others did it and faced no consequences. No government step-in, no mass customer loss. When there are no consequences for greedy monopolistic behaviours, greedy monopolies act greedily. Welcome to market capitalism without proper regulation.
Interest rates
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To be fair it does seem like there’s some kind of coordinated effort going on.
Now the clause is completely absent in any of the new ToS, which means that users are obligated to any changes Unity made to their services regardless of version numbers including pricing updates such as the recent fee that will charge developers per game install.
No, it doesn’t. Just because Unity decide to update the terms and conditions does not mean that users are obligated to accept new terms.
That sounds like a company I want to completely rely on to develop a product, a company and my whole dev career.
Like the kid that took his ball and went home and then is surprised that nobody wants to play with him.
I don’t see how any of this would hold up in court. I’m pretty sure you can’t be liable for a new tos for what is essentially new software that you didn’t use in your project. This company is clearly run by fucktards who are hoping to prey upon devs that just don’t know better or can’t fight back.
The Unity Runtime (Basicallt the core of the engine) is technically licensed as a subscription. So when the free license renews, this is included in the new ToS and it’ll be a lot harder to fight.
Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?
I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.
You’re completely right, but Unity also has the money to get this to be stuck in court for ages. They’re counting on being able to win a war of attrition on it.
There’s just enough questionable tactics around it that it’s legally plausible they get away with it.
This fight will probably set some major precedent for how online services charge.
anytime your company policy is, “…win a legal war of attrition…” your company is shit.
Corporations might have an iron grip over basically everything in our life, reducing our choices to a minimum, out of necessity, but the fact that they think we’re stupid too, is actually astounding
In many cases the have not been proven wrong.
Sounds like Elon is running the company now
Or it could be someone who worked for EA before.
John Riccitiello is an American business executive who is chief executive officer (CEO) of Unity Technologies. Previously, he served as CEO, chief operating officer and president of Electronic Arts…
He is the main villain of No More Heroes.
Who is influencing all these tech companies to be this greedy lately?
High interest rates. They built up the entire industry on the concept that they would have access to cheap capital forever. Now they don’t, so they’re squeezing their userbases – who they’ve already been squeezing even with low interest rates – from absurdly greedy to Saturday morning cartoon villain.
That, and probably investment in commercial real estate, which of course tanked because of WFH, which is also why so many companies are forcing people back into the office.
Do you have any further reading on this? I’d love to learn more about how we got here
I first got exposed to the problem from this Adam Conover interview with Dan Olson: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4aU-QkJfgGw
This article is also a nice encapsulation of the problem, even though it focuses on financial technology only, it applies to other tech companies as well:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fintech-faces-reckoning-only-matter-133006783.htmlIn an attempt to reboot the global economy, central banks slashed interest rates to almost zero, resulting in an era of cheap money.
This resulted in two things. First, it incentivized investors to fund promising (and, in many cases, not so promising) young tech companies. But it also allowed for the emergence of business models that, in any other circumstance, would be completely unviable.
So buy very long puts on Chime is my take away from that Yahoo article.
Edit: Nevermind… Chime is still private. They keep pushing back their IPO because fintech stocks keep declining…
You mean we can just do what we want and nobody will stop us?
Git is distributed you can add any remote with one line
Everyone uses GitHub, a Microsoft product, to host code
GitHub is subject to the DMCA, for example
Did we learn nothing from SourceForge, my friends?!?!?
“Oh no, Microsoft DMCA’d my project! Whatever will I do with this fully intact git history that I have mirrored by design on every single development machine?”
git remote seturl origin https://codeberg.org/me/my-projectI’ve gotta say, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly substantial issue. I’ll admit that it becomes harder to find contributors when you’re trying to operate outside of the $MAINSTREAM_PLATFORM, but that’s going to be a perpetual problem in the world of “Forge-likes” until someone figures out how to federate the social-media aspects of it (sidenote: why hasn’t anyone tried doing that?)
EDIT: Of course someone was already working on it. Why did I even think of assuming otherwise? Godspeed to the ForgeFed project!
Every website hosted in the US is subject to DMCA (or directly getting sued for copyright infringement). Even if you host your own website and refuse to comply with DMCA requests, they’ll just send them to your hosting provider instead.
Did we learn nothing from SourceForge, my friends?!?!?
Isn’t GitLab an alternative?
The trash fire rises.
