Preface

I'm not brave, I'm just afraid of the alternative.

Throughout my years-long experience as a Godot Engine contributor, I’ve been noticing strange contradictions with respect to Godot’s development and decision-making processes. For quite some time, I used to think that those inconsistencies were a byproduct of something which I didn’t fully understand yet. Perhaps that’s why Godot followers constantly joked about waiting for Godot. I decided to ignore those strange discrepancies at that time, expecting that the entire system will be eventually settled, so I put my trust in Godot regardless, especially as I’ve seen how other devoted contributors were accepting decisions without casting any doubt on Godot leadership.

Notwithstanding, the apparent lack of decided focus in Godot resulted in accumulation of disparities, to a point where it reached its climax to be evident. Me and other curious contributors have figured that these contradictions hurt Godot’s workflow and integrity, so I decided to discuss them with the community, and such discussions have received mostly positive feedback, especially from the community outside of Godot. To quote some of them:

“It’s been a great relief to see your commentary on Godot, as it reflects how I felt about their community and leadership during the time I tried their software. It always felt off, and I couldn’t understand why some incredibly opinionated and wrongheaded decisions were held too strongly.”

However, every attempt at clarifying Godot’s development philosophy and governance model in order to resolve existing contradictions and inconsistencies has resulted in a great push-back from Godot’s toxic leadership, which led to eventual exclusion of myself from all Godot’s community spaces in spite of my merit as seen by Godot community.

Since then, I’ve been talking about how Godot’s toxic leadership causes unnecessary conflicts that can be easily avoided or at least minimized within the inner circle of core developers and community of users in general, and how such toxic leadership promotes unquestionable attitude that discourages critical thinking, which is definitely a problem that must be solved.

You might ask, “How could it be that a seemingly welcoming community could have toxic leadership?” Most of the things that you see about Godot on the surface is mostly a facade, and hopefully you’ll understand why by the end of this book.

By cheating and exploiting the human desire for belonging, we violate autonomy of the human will. Therefore, this kind of behavior is unethical. For this reason, it is also my ethical duty to write this book. In doing so, I hope to encourage people to exercise their self-determination within open-source communities and in everyday life.

People kept asking me the same questions, therefore this book is the answer to all of those accumulated and repeated questions so far. This work consolidates everything I’ve learnt from within and outside of Godot Engine community on this topic.