Finally, this thread today will discuss how decisions involving money and donations in Godot are made. While this was explained before, I will take the time to clarify it once more..
As explained on the previous thread, Godot is legally a part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Within the organization sits the Godot PLC (Project Leadership Comitee), which is the one that decides and authorizes the usage of project funds (donations)..
The PLC is composed by veteran project contributors and founders:
-Juan Linietsky (me)
-Ariel Manzur (founder)
-Remi Verschelde (@Akien )
-Julian Murgia (@TheStraToN )
-Hein Pieter van Braam (@TMM2K)
-Bastiaan Olij (@mux213 )
-George Marques (@vnen )
The PLC, however, rarely decides something on its own. Usage of funds is discussed and approved by the Core Contributors, which is also a group of around 30 veteran and trusted contributors and area maintainers. We hold online meetings and discuss these topics regularly.
Godot is a huge project and the Core Contributors have a great reach to all areas of it, both technical and social, so our meetings are generally well informed, this allows steering the project direction more precisely.
A common question may be "How do I ask to join the Core Contributors, or even the PLC?". The answers is you don't.
Contributions in Godot are based on merit (we agree PR is good, we merge), while leadership is based on trust (we trust you, we ask you to join).
The "easiest" way is to take maintainership of an engine area, or contribute significantly to it, and show other maintainers that you can be trusted over time at it (fix bugs, review PRs, etc). This will give you a stronger voice on deciding where the project wants to go.
So, I hope this clears misunderstandings on this. Feel free to ask any question if any doubts remain!
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I will also take the time today to clarify something many seem to misunderstand. I hear often the question "Can company X come and purchase Godot?" "Can Godot developers decide to make it commercial and charge for it?" "Can it go closed or paid?"
Some facts:
1. Godot legally exists as part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. As a not-for profit charity, they receive donations and, based on their mission statement, use them for the benefit of the project. As no company is behind Godot, it can't be sold or purchased.
2. Godot license is MIT, which means you can do pretty much everything as long as you don't misrepresent the origin of the software (you can't claim you wrote it, you must give proper credit). Even with that, in practice, you can do anything you want as if you wrote it yourself.
Godot is _not_ a company, it' s FOSS, volunteer based. _No one_ tells anyone want to do. Contributors work on what they want, whenever they want. There is _no_ resource allocation, _no_ central authority ordering people around.
Paid contributors are paid to do what they already do well, to contribute more time to the areas they already have been contributing, so the following misconceptions about Godot development are 100% false:
* Godot allocates more time to 3D, so it allocates less time to 2D.
* Godot decides to support on C#, so less time is dedicated to GDScript
* Godot will work more on VR, so the engine will see less progress somewhere else.
Godot is doing many one-time hires to specialized contributors (some external) these months using saved project funds in order to push forward some Areas, like improving build system, text and internationalzation, web stuff, fixes to X11, etc. So far they were pretty successful..
Like the contributors the project hires full time, these depend on people with proven contribution quality to be available for hiring. Currently a few of them are, but we are already low on funds for this (keep tuned for the upcoming unified funding page for more visibility)
So the question here is, would you be ok doing a crowdfunding (separate from monthly donation and sponsoring) to help finance these specific things? Should we instead ask for more donations?
Halloween does not really exist where I live, but since everyone is in the mood I will tell you an amazingly creepy story that happened to me many years ago. This is real mind you!...
March 2013. I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend (and stayed at his apartment) who moved from Argentina to the US a few years before then. To get internet for my phone and computer, I asked for his WiFi pass. Network was "Awesomatic", password was his name plus phone number..
Spent some days there, then went to GDC (in San Francisco), then returned back to my home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some days after my return, something really strange happened.
Both my phone and computer were still connected to "Awesomatic", and both had internet... 👻
[Thread] I get asked very often how can I be able to work on so many low level areas effortlessly in Godot, like rendering, physics, audio DSP, UI toolkits, scripting languages, networking, IO, pathfinding, platform porting, etc. and still do it efficiently.
The thing is, I just consider myself a generalist and I firmly believe that the "Jack of all trades master of none" label that we generalists are despectively labelled with is bullshit. Additionally, you don't need to master something in order to be very proficient with it.
There is a lot in the "knowledge surface" of things that is useless. I don't always do through research on topics before diving into them. I just look at what is available and try to see what is of use for my goals. Learning without goals is difficult and confusing for me anyway
It's easy to see @VulkanAPI as a glass half full or half empty. If you look at it from the negative side, it's a very complex API due to the very large amount of hardware supported, and many hardware "limits" can range from 4/16 to 1<<32 make it very challenging for portability.
The low level nature of it makes it difficult to deal with because it's not immediately obvious how limitations can be overcome. It appears to be an incredibly flexible API, but the more you use it the more you find there really is one "real" way to do things.
Still, so far, I think the positive aspects definitely outweigh the negative ones. Having something so low level ensures that drivers are simpler and less bug ridden (compared to how it used to be in the OpenGL era). I still found bugs, but nothing serious.