Megalomaniak So what, the community will keep steamrolling on. Even if the original developers quit the OSS project and go full time with W4 it won't be an issue at all. In fact, it rather sounds like that might be your ideal outcome
Hopefully, yes. But I'm realistic about this.
Megalomaniak They'd be free to try and do so irregardless, this still has nothing to do with W4. And anybody in the OSS community is still free to create a competing OSS solution. So this is a nothing burger.
Which may lead to community division. Do you see division as a bad or good thing? You can already find Godot forks out there, I won't mention them here to avoid advertisement. And with W4, I forecast that we'll see even more Godot forks out there. I think division is inevitable regardless, see the many Linux distributions.
Megalomaniak By the developers that the patreon support pays for? Of course, so what? Any community developer is still free to tackle whatever issue they want and provide a pull request however.
This is not an issue per-se if Godot is community-informed. But Godot gives out an impression that it's community-driven, which is not the case, which is a big difference, according to my experience and research, both as an ex-contributor and an ex-member of Godot project. So we're talking about not meeting expectations of what constitutes community power over decision making.
Even if someone creates a pull request for a popularly requested feature, it may not be merged, and not necessarily because of quality, but due to other reasons, like maintenance. However, Godot leadership could delegate maintenance of a feature to someone who created it, yet they don't delegate such privileges for the most part. And maintenance equals to decision-making power, which Godot leadership won't give up. There's a reason why Akien is the only person who's generally allowed to merge pull requests. In truly community-driven projects, we'd see several people managing and merging pull requests, but even after 8 years of development, we don't see it happening as a common practice in Godot. Even money is not required for this. Just have more trust in developer community to fulfill Godot's vision, whatever it is. Let community define it. That's my vision.
But yeah, nowadays, you can go to Godot's governance page and see it for yourself, but it was added like a year ago. That means Godot has been potentially confusing many users and contributors to think that Godot is community-driven for whopping 7 years since it got open-sourced. Even with Godot's governance documented, many people won't actually read it, unfortunately. Even then, they're still not completely honest about their governance.
If you read the Advisors section there, this exactly what describes community-informed development approaches. Community-driven approaches don't require advisory groups, because community-driven approaches are governed using "bottom-up" principles, but with Godot it's more like "top-down". Godot Contributors Chat has a private advisors
channel, by the way.
Again, you may not see this yourself if you haven't closely interacted within Godot's development community. I'm not the only one who thinks this way, you can read, for instance, LillyByte's feedback on hypocritical leadership in Godot.
My point is that while Godot is open-source, the mentality behind it is not necessarily open. Unlike Blender and other healthy open-source projects, the discrepancy between words vs actions vs expectations vs reality is quite severe in Godot, that's my core point.
I don't have an issue with commercial companies, and I don't have an issue with open-source either. I just expect to participate in an honest project, where most discussions are open, with little to no hypocrisy and ambiguities. Godot does not inspire confidence in this regard. I've seen some people who got fed up by Godot's decisions in the past, and they left the community without a single word expressing their stance on this, which is sad. More people should talk about this.
I don't see success merely from the perspective of technology. The success is largely determined by human factor.
This is what Godot leadership says (rhetoric):
- To users: "Community is in charge, everything is transparent and democratic"
- To contributors: "Development is solely based on trust, not meritocracy nor democracy"
If Godot's decisions are going to create disappointment by overpromising features, or keep telling that community is in charge, then it will definitely backfire.
If the creation of W4 Games company is going to improve Godot, I don't mind that. But it's equally important to be honest and open about these kind of decisions.
To summarize my thoughts about Godot leadership using popular idioms:
- If you run after two hares, you will catch neither.
- You can't have your cake and eat it.