Everyone can agree on VLC being the best video player, right? Game developers can agree on it too, since it is a great utility for playing multimedia in games, and/or have a video player included. However, disaster struck; Unity has now banned VLC from the Unity Store, seemingly due to it being under the LGPL license which is a "Violation of section 5.10.4 of the Provider agreement." This is a contridiction however. According to Martin Finkel in the linked article, "Unity itself, both the Editor and the runtime (which means your shipped game) is already using LGPL dependencies! Unity is built on libraries such as Lame, libiconv, libwebsockets and websockify.js (at least)." Unity is swiftly coming to it's demise.
Edit: link to Videolan Blog Post: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
I also thought VLC was a bit shaky on their legality as well, but since their HQ was in a Nordic country (iirc) with more lax copyright laws, they got away with it.
So I wouldn't blame an app store for not wanting to take on legal gray area risk.
VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?
I think the discussion below your comment is good, but your comment, and the community response (in the form of comment votes), illustrates a problem I have with the lemmy community.
Counter arguments are important.
It seems Lemmy has an even bigger problem than Reddit did with circle jerks. Any counter argument that goes against the grain is immediately pounced on here. Especially if you don't write a page long disclaimer that you don't necessarily agree with the decision, I'm one of you, etc.
I simply pointed out that <hated company> may have had a good reason to consider <3rd party plugin> a big enough legal liability to triage out of their store for the time being, based on some half remembered related knowledge of murky legal details of the past.
You immediately implied that I'm some sort of corporate shill, even if it was politely worded. And the community piled on in response.
It would be nice if there was at least an attempt to understand both sides of an argument here.
Are,…we,..the baddies?
But what about all those highly voted articles about how OTHER social media sites are dangerous echo chambers!