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Is this whole thing based on a misunderstanding of what "unrelated to the Godot project" means? I'm not familiar with the situation, but from reading the post
by mort96 3y ago
Is this whole thing based on a misunderstanding of what "unrelated to the Godot project" means?
I'm not familiar with the situation, but from reading the post and the linked tweets, it looks like W4 Games isn't the Godot Foundation, W4 is a separate company which happens to be run by some of the founders of Godot. From the mission statement on the website:
> Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need.
It seems like the majority of Godot development happens by people employed by the Godot Foundation, which makes sense, and W4 offers products and services around Godot, which also makes sense. Sort of a "Canonical offers commercial products and services (Ubuntu Pro) around the Linux kernel, but doesn't do the majority of development on the kernel itself" type situation.
The post says:
> This doesn't make sense, the whole mission statement of W4 Games was to grow the Godot ecosystem, but now a few short months later, Godot has no money and development will slow down. This is suspicious, to say the least.
but, like, there's no logical contradiction between "a company focused on providing enterprise products and services around Godot has a bunch of money" and "Godot development slows down because the Godot Foundation can't afford to keep developers on payroll".
Literally the only potentially shady thing I could see here is if people were mislead into donating to W4 because they thought W4 would focus on development of Godot itself? But the post doesn't even make that claim, much less provide proof for it, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
So the only thing that's left to complain about is that development is slower than ideal, but that's the case in most software projects. It's not like anyone expected it to be quick and easy to make a game engine which rivals Unity and Unreal, right? ...right?
- lusus_naturae 3y agoIf you read W4 site: "Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project."
- mort96 3y agoYeah, and I'm sure they'll do that eventually, as W4 grows into a profitable company with a stable revenue stream. But the $8 million wasn't pledged to go towards the Godot Foundation, right? That wouldn't even have made sense, if people wanted to donate to Godot, they would've donated to Godot.
- lusus_naturae 3y agoIt's a reasonable to say that W4 has its own obligations, though just based on that snippet on the home page it's hard to say what the extent and constraint of those obligations are w.r.t Godot. I don't think it's necessary (or fair to Godot) to assume that stable revenue for W4 is a requirement. I am not involved in this ecosystem nor do I have the whole history of it to say if there were any broken promises. I guess then it's up to the responsible parties to hammer out misunderstandings with their open source developers (who I feel for). Clearly there are mismatched expectations around.
- mort96 3y agoI agree that there seems to be some mismatched expectations around, but I don't get why. Why should the expectation be that the seed funding from VCs to found a startup would serve as donations to the Godoy Foundation? If so, why? Nothing in TFA even mentions anything which could be construed as promises to that effect. Now what would truly be a scam is if the founders of W4 raised $8m of seed funding based on false promises, then donated all that cash to the Godot Foundation instead of developing the products which were pitched to the investors. I genuinely don't understand why there's apparently an expectation from at least some people that W4 would do that, or why so many people here (you included!) think that's a remotely reasonable expectation.
- lusus_naturae 3y agoIt's a good question, isn't it? Why does the Godot community (and not just OP) feel like they did "work for free". I've seldom come across this kind of sentiment elsewhere in opensource, so I am wondering why in this case there are mismatched expectations. Like I said, as an outsider I can't speak to any of this properly as I don't have more context. I am keeping an open mind either way, you may completely right in assuming that there were no promises made (legal or otherwise) that gave rise to this kind of expectation misalignment. The point I am making is this: regardless of the separation of Godot Foundation and W4, if the goodwill and work of the community was used to ensure some kind of future for W4, then it makes sense to pay that back in kind.