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.
Both Godot and Redot expose GIT repositories on GitHub making it easy to see if development is progressing. By way of explanation for non-programmers, these days software source code is managed using ‘source control’ software, which is a bit like Word tracked changes with masses more features. When someone completes some programming work, they make a, ‘pull request’ which shows their changes and additions highlighted, just like a Word document with tracked changes. The work can then be debugged, approved, rejected or sent back for further amendments. Both Godot and Redot have made their lists public.
When I viewed the Redot Engine GitHub repository I found 81 pull requests since it was created last week. 41 had been closed (approved or rejected) and 40 were open. On reviewing I found some were branding changes, some rejected as trolling or undesirable, some genuinely new development including new features and bugfixes. Development is real and ramping up slowly. For example, this approved request represents completed steps in new feature work. Redot seems to have kept their promises to be politically neutral. For example they inherited functionality that can show the letters, ‘LGBT’ in rainbow colours. When a contributor raised a pull request to remove this, it was rejected on the basis that the engine should not remove functionality that some people might want to use (archive).
In contrast, Godot have 44,080 pull requests since 4 January 2014. That is a little over 10 a day for each project. So they have a similar rate of work. However, Godot have a disturbingly large number of open pull requests. That is, units of completed work that have been proposed for inclusion but not been merged or rejected. In my opinion, that is mismanagement. That means someone somewhere has donated time and their work has not either been accepted, or rejected as undesirable (e.g. poor quality code, unwanted feature / change, bugged). In fact, as of today, some open requests date back to 2019. That is farcical.
SHAME: Julian 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 political statements. Now it emerges the project he founded has left pull requests – donated programming work – unhandled for over 5 years.
Imagine that happening in a commercial project, a firm paying employees or contractors firm to work on a project – perhaps £500 or more per diem + Value Added Tax (VAT) – to produce code and then failing to determine the quality of the work for over 5 years. I can assure you that employees or contractors would very likely be seeking to enforce payment long before then. It would be like taking a stack of fifty pound notes and burning them on a brazier in the office. If it was discovered, the manager(s) would be fired. Imagine working in a widget factory and leaving widgets in the quality checking in-tray for 5 years. Doing the same with what in effect are donations for the public good is even worse.
With source code, there are also likely to be difficulties in merging proposed code changes based on the source as it was five years before the current date, especially in a popular and fast-moving project. If a pull request still, ‘needs work’ after a few months it should be closed. If the donor wants to submit an improved version they can always open a new pull request.
It is early days for the Redot Engine but they are starting to move forward and keep their promises. They are not promoting far-left views but they are not excluding any particular minority group or promoting any other political view either. In contrast, questions about mismanagement and bias at the Godot Engine are, if anything, growing.
Readers minded to try out using the Godot Game Engine would be well advised to try its fork, Redot, instead. Readers thinking of donating coding time would be well advised to consider Redot also.
