Thread by @Xrayez

Godot leadership betrays their ideology!

Lead developer @reduzio and project manager @Akien launched a commercial company called W4 Games!

Free and #OpenSource game engine wants to have a cake and eat it too!

#GodotEngine #CancelGodotEngine #TruthAboutGodot #GameDev

W4 Games website.

Notice how Godot leadership deliberately leaves out important information when they say it's a company of "Godot veterans", but those "Godot veterans" and Godot leadership are the same persons.

w4games.com

Feel free to familiarize yourself with my previous threads on this topic to understand why Godot is not community-driven and my explanation of why the mentality of Godot leadership is not open as you might have expected:

https://twitter.com/Xrayez/status/1543953870514184195

You can read my perspective on W4 Games as an ex-developer and maintainer of Godot starting from here at Godot community forums:

godotforums.org/d/30836-though…

Godot was never an engine made by community, for community. Only a few end up being selected by Godot leadership to develop Godot, and will always be owned by Godot leadership.

The end justifies the means for Godot leadership, they don't really care about FOSS ideology, they simply exploit it by convincing contributors to think that Godot is community-driven. The open-source part of Godot is just a sheep in wolf's clothing.

Godot leadership is obsessed with a mission to replace those "evil" organizations (as they portrait it) with themselves, not creating robust software. Many crucial bugs and usability issues are still left unresolved in Godot.

Godot leadership will be tempted to work on the proprietary side of things and prioritize commercial support over Godot development. The fact that business owners of W4 Games are the key members of FOSS project (Godot) is quite worrisome.

This conflict of interest, open-source and commercial organizations managed in the same person, will eventually lead to corruption. Juan and Rémi are now jacks of all trades but masters of none. If they run after two hares, they will catch neither.

Some large commercial company may eventually buy W4 Games given good enough financial offer. Rest assure that people like Juan will definitely agree to sell W4 Games and "clarify" that this decision is in the interest of Godot community and free and open-source software! 🙃

The fact that Godot is a member project of Software Freedom Conservancy doesn't help or change this much. SFC gets 10% from all donations coming from Godot. SFC will be delighted to have that commercial cake in the form of donations. By the way, SFC hasn't responded to my emails.

Due to above, this may not necessarily give ownership of Godot to those commercial companies that may end up buying W4 Games, but it will allow them to steer core Godot contributors away from Godot by offering them to work on proprietary versions of Godot per contract.

To clarify: I don't care where Godot ends up, it's not an issue per se. But their dishonesty, hypocrisy, deceptions, never-ending lies, false promises, coercion of contributors etc. are the core issue with Godot. Nothing good will come out of this.

https://twitter.com/Xrayez/status/1559142856757022720