A week ago MHN published an article on a split in the @GodotEngine community caused by perceived partisan political posturing and high-handed bans. This week, I revisited the two repositories to see whether new rival fork the Redot Engine (@RedotEngine on Twitter, @Redot-Engine on Github) were making any actual development progress. I observed that Redot were beginning to ramp up and move forward. Whilst trying to compare, I discovered that @GodotEngine had left pull requests (units of completed programming work) open and unresolved for over five years. Based on the Godot Engine project’s own public records and my experience as a Senior Software Developer and owner of an IT firm, in my opinion that is mismanagement by the Godot Engine maintainers.

The Godot Game Engine project maintainers have left *completed* work by volunteer developers languish for over five years without approving or rejecting. If it still, ‘needs work’ after five years the request should be closed and they can always open a new one if they want to submit an improved version.

Redot Engine is a fork of the moderately well known open source project, the Godot Game Engine. It was formally launched last week after posts by project members were perceived by some as partisan political comments. This was accompanied by controversial bans and social media blocks which alienated a significant chunk of the Godot community. I followed up to see if there was any development substance to the new project or whether it was just political noise.

Continue reading →

Juan Linietsky is the founder of the open source product the Godot Game Engine. He has set his Twitter profile private after a storm of protest hit the project, including over his own statements, which could amount to unlawful discrimination if made in jurisdictions such as the UK.

The popular open-source project for the game making tool Godot Game Engine is imploding after describing itself as #Wokot on Twitter, facing allegations of political purges and unlawful processing of user data, leading to a storm of condemnation by users, donor exits and the creation of a rival ‘fork’ called the Redot Engine. The problem has been worsened by a tone deaf post about gender politics from founder Juan Linietsky which may be seen by some as pro-transgender, but, although he may not have intended it, in your author’s opinion may be seen by others as endorsing abuse and misogyny. In some jurisdictions, the post could be seen as unlawful discrimination or creating a hostile environment.

The Godot Game Engine is an open-source tool for making games. For those readers unfamiliar with software development, it is a pre-written library of code that can be used to avoid reinventing the wheel when making games. Such libraries are popular because they save a lot of time and money. They are not generally political and nothing in the Godot Engine license has any political content, instead using the popular MIT license.

Problems at the project began on 27 September 2024 when the official account posted this tweet (archive):

The Godot Engine official account triggered the controversy by describing the engine as #Wokot.

The post, to MHN’s mind is gauche, but it was probably not the cause of the project’s problems. The project was responding to ludicrous assertions online that only ‘woke’ game developers used engines, which is absurd. Lots of companies use engines from a variety of commercial and open-source brands. What really triggered the outrage was blocking people for mild dissent and requests for technical fixes:

A developer sent this mildly critical message only to be blocked.

Twitter user @funnygamedev tweeted the above message asking for fixes to bitmap font functions (archive), only to be blocked shortly thereafter (archive). Other users reported similar experiences, only to be blocked. Some users even complained of being blocked when they had never used or interacted with the @GodotEngine account [1] (archive) [2] (archive).

Continue reading →