Thread by @Xrayez

Godot is NOT community-driven. Let me explain why.

#GodotEngine #CancelGodotEngine

There exist many definitions of community-led approaches. Because Godot attracts people from all around the world, it's extremely important to be explicit about this.

The lead developer of Godot, Juan (@reduzio), says that he always encourages public technical discussions.

But oftentimes, @reduzio ignores and rejects public discussions in Godot, especially when those discussions constructively criticize Godot:

Sometimes, you can even see @reduzio using the "consensus" word as if it's his sole property:

Hopefully, the above shows you a clear contradiction in what @reduzio says to the public versus his actions. Mind you, this is just an example, and a little bit of research can confirm that these contradictions do exist and are typical in Godot community.

The fact that contradictions exist is fine, as long as they are resolved. But when Godot leadership ignores to acknowledge that those contradictions exist and/or rejects to resolve them, this is where we talk about their hypocritical behavior.

For example, Godot's development philosophy is still not defined. But you have to be aware that all healthy #OpenSource projects do have their development philosophy/principles written down, but @reduzio does not see the absence of philosophy as a problem: github.com/godotengine/go…

At the same time, Godot developers (even paid ones) have absolutely no feeling of obligation whey they talk about donations.

chat.godotengine.org/channel/genera…

This is because Godot's development does not have a sense of responsibility. But this is one of the major cornerstones and a condition for enabling absolutely all types of community-led approaches.

The above is frankly enough to make a preliminary conclusion that Godot is NOT community-driven, because it actually acts more like a private commercial company which allows some people to work on the engine for free.

In fact, if you read the history about Godot, it was developed as part of OKAM Studio, and you'll even notice that the original Godot repository was part of OKAM Studio organization at GitHub:

https://twitter.com/Xrayez/status/1537096912440000513

Godot leadership says that there's no guarantee that all feature proposals that received a lot of 👍 will be implemented. And that's totally understandable. Godot cannot possibly implement all features that exist under the sun.

chat.godotengine.org/channel/devel?…

But when I created a proposal asking Godot whether they would be interested in promoting and/or recommending community extensions for Godot (which also received a positive feedback from Godot community), it got completely ignored by Godot leadership:

github.com/godotengine/go…

In other discussion, one member said that "he's in favor of opinionated decision making process with few decision makers", and Godot's Discord admin saying "Godot should strive to be less community-driven":

github.com/godotengine/go…

With community-led approaches, users trust community leaders to manage something using the "bottom-up" principle.

But in Godot, it's actually polarized the other way. They fixate on trust and give trust to community members, or deny this trust. Basically, this is "top-down", autocratic approach:

https://twitter.com/Xrayez/status/1527731982418984960

So, at this point, you may ask: which community-led approach Godot follows?

After my discussions with Godot leadership you see above, they have set up a governance model page. Unfortunately, it took 7 years after Godot got open-sourced. You'll see their own definition of what they mean by "community-driven" there:

godotengine.org/governance

But here's the problem: they re-define what "community-driven" means and call it "community-minded", which is substitution of concepts, because these are distinct concepts. Doesn't it remind you the "fine print" technique used in contracts?

The governance page says that the development of features is not prioritized by any corporate entity, which is false.

Feature development is prioritized in two ways in Godot:

1. People who donate via Patreon.
2. Companies that give restricted funds and grants for implementing specific features.

Example: godotengine.org/article/godot-…

Therefore, the project direction of Godot largely depends on the bulk of money they receive from various sponsors. It doesn't matter who's that sponsor in Godot, even the gambling industry will do:

godotengine.org/article/interb…

Juan has written an article called "Shedding light on Godot's development process", which is hypocritical about who's the boss and who makes decisions in Godot, once again:

godotengine.org/article/sheddi…

But the above sheds light on one thing: Patreon voting. Only people who donate money via Patreon prioritize feature development in Godot:

So again, you may ask at this point: what's wrong with that? The problem is that Godot leadership shields themselves behind community, while showing all signs of being an actual commercial company.

This dissonance must be resolved. Solutions:

- Do not call Godot "community-driven", but "community-informed".
- Stop giving a false impression that Godot is democratic/meritocratic.

Or:

- Declare that Godot is a commercial project/company that uses community feedback and uses #OpenSource to accept work from others (like Microsoft does, for instance).

Conclusion: optimistically speaking, Godot is community-informed. But realistically speaking, the above contradictions can be explained in one way: Godot shares all characteristics of being an actual cult organization in IT and #GameDev, where Juan is a cult leader.

If you'd like to understand why Godot is a cult, you can read my personal story:

https://twitter.com/Xrayez/status/1536053400068100102

I have used "Understanding Community-Led Approaches to Community Change" paper to describe Godot's approach:

tamarackcommunity.ca/hubfs/Resource…

I'd also like to underline that Godot has so-called "advisors". Advisory groups are typical for community-shaped/community-informed approaches, but not community-driven.

Godot has "advisors" channel at Godot Contributors Chat (previously called "coredevs"), which is private.

Commenting on "lack proximity to the issues" in Godot: Juan oftentimes doesn't recognize bugs as being actual bugs, and Juan would rather close bug reports rather than to fix them, or until they cause "enough pain", which is a really bad approach to have:

github.com/godotengine/go…