Democracy

Is Godot a democracy? The short answer is: definitely not. When people ask this question, even the project manager of Godot says along the lines of:

Godot is in no way a democracy.

But why does Godot leadership keeps depicting it as such? For example, when they write news articles about Godot, they show images of a “Godot candidate” that you can allegedly “vote” for¹:

Another example is when lead developer writes an article on April’s Fool, suggesting that Godot “democratizes development”²:

We also want to democratize game development. As you know, Godot Engine developers and other members of the community have always listened to your concerns, troubleshot your problems, fixed bugs you reported, implemented many of your suggestions and merged untold numbers of pull requests. This may have sufficed at one point in our history, but can continue no longer, as it’s clearly a greivous form of communism, and communism is the enemy of democracy.

Of course, this is presented as a joke, yet they play on the verge of ambiguity to show that their development is based on democratic principles, so users who have no clue how open-source works would rather choose to believe that Godot is a real democracy. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding is prevalent in Godot community of regular users because Godot is mostly used by hobbyists.

While the concept of democratic values is different from democratic governance, Godot as a project gives a false impression of having democratic governance specifically. For example, users of Godot have a false idea that features are accepted through the voting process. This is not the case. According to lead developer’s article on Godot’s development process, only people who donate to the project financially have a right to vote³:

Conservancy asks that Patreon rewards can at much affect the priority of tutorials, demos or features that the project is already intending to do. We can’t offer rewards unrelated to Godot’s goals. This is why we ask the whole community for proposals, then we later approve them, and only Patrons have voting power in the end [emphasis added].

So, this creates different classes of users and user-developers in the eyes of Godot leadership, based on whether they donate financially to the project. This approach may be fine if a project is community-informed, but Godot declares oneself to be community-driven, where decision-making powers are usually based on do-ocracy. It means that do-ers can also decide which features they would like to work on, as voted by people at Godot Improvement Proposals, which must not depend solely on Godot leadership approving proposals according to voters who donate to the project financially, again, in a community-driven project. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter how many thumb-ups you have on Godot proposal, or how much your proposal received user support. If donators don’t vote on it, a proposal will mostly likely be left in the Limbo.

Even then, as you’ve hopefully read in Waiting for Philosophy chapter, there’s apparent chicken-or-egg problem: one cannot prioritize features through voting if vision and mission of Godot are not defined in the first place, and Godot’s roadmap keeps changing in accordance to their mood.

You’ll also find that Godot leadership founded a commercial company called W4 Games. If you go to their LinkedIn page, you’ll see yet another instance of this so-called “democratization”, quote:

W4 Games is an Irish start-up which plans to revolutionize the online gaming market with a cloud platform based on open source technology, which will unlock and democratize [emphasis added] the online multiplayer market for all independent developers.

Having said that, if Godot leadership has decided to create a commercial company for Godot, literally claiming that they would like to democratize the market for developers, we can assume that Godot Engine as an open-source project would adhere to similar values, right? But in reality, this is not the case. Apparently, Godot leadership is fine to keep this ambiguous in order to attract people who share democracy values.

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