What does HackerNews think of TermsOfService?

An open letter to our community | Sep 2023

Thanks, I'll use the delay feature. I accept that this has nothing to do with Godot.

I did find the TOS in question, as expected, it's very old (from 2019):

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.co...

So people saying "who's to say they won't do this again," if four years isn't enough for you to catch up, I don't know what to tell you.

Edit: They have also brought the repo back, which was likely another unrelated change:

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy caused | Sep 2023

Expand Context ↕

> Even the apology misses the most important fact, which is not necessarily the cost of the change itself, but the demonstration that Unity is willing to change terms AFTER you've shipped software using their engine. That's a massive breach of trust as well as a massive risk.

And the obvious fix to that is to put out an announcement saying "Sorry about that, you can trust us, and if you release a game using Unity you can stick with that version of the ToS instead of us being able to foist new terms on you whenever we want forever."

Except.... Unity did that already last time they made company destroying ToS changes, and then just went back on the promise and said they're forcing the new ToS on everyone. So why the hell is anyone supposed to trust whatever apology they put out this time?

https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...

Updated Terms of Service and commitment to being an open platform (2019)

Retroactive TOS changes

When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.

In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project.*

Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link is https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService.

Unity's actions are unacceptable, I cannot keep endorsing this | Sep 2023

Expand Context ↕

A more important issue that's not being considered here is that when they had their debacle with Improbable, they committed to a GitHub repo[1] with all the ToS changes and outright said that people could keep using the ToS of whatever major version of Unity they used[2].

They have now deleted the repo, so I wonder if they're just gonna pretend they never committed to that.

1. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService 2. https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...