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).
