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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if it was possible to develop a plugin for an engine to load spine in a game and let the decision of the license to the game developer (and not the engine developer). Right now you either are blessed that the spine devs decided to care for your engine or you aren't. It would be nice if a FOSS engine dev could develop a Spine plugin and then a game dev that was thinking about that engine could either opt to use it or not.

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This is basically what the community is already doing. This is the package I've been using in Flame and its license (https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine).

"License

The code and all associated assets of the flame_spine package is distributed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). HOWEVER, as flame_spine includes Spine Runtime libraries, your use of flame_spine in your games or other products is also subject to the terms and conditions of the Spine Runtime License Agreement (see the LICENSE file).

In particular, in order to use flame_spine you are required to obtain a valid Spine Editor License."

In the legalese text it's written in way that the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work.

>the person that is making the plugin must also hold a license which is too much, not going to pay to do work.

I suppose the idea is that you're paying to work on something that will make you money. And then if you have a FOSS mentality you can share that for others using your engine.

But I'm sure there's wiggle room if you contact. if you're an up and coming engine and are interested I'm sure Spine only has to gain by having its tech ready to go with it.

Anyone can distribute the Spine Runtimes without a Spine license, but they have to attach the Spine Runtimes license, which means the need for a Spine license is pushed down the line to their users. In this way someone without a Spine license can use the Spine Runtimes in game toolkits/etc without having a license themselves. https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license

Presumably, if you’re writing a Spine runtime, it’s because you’d like to integrate it into one of your own projects in an environment that they don’t officially support. I’m not sure why you’d take on that “work” if you didn’t already have a license.

The license explicitely allows that. Basically all third party integrations do exactly that.

That's not what you wrote here

https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/issues/20...

No, that's exactly what I meant. The author says they want to write a plugin which uses spine-cpp to render Spine skeletons.

A user of that plugin needs a Spine Editor license. The author of the plugin does not. Users of the engine not using the plugin do not need a license either. That's how integrations with e.g. GameMaker, Defold, etc. have worked for years.

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