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Godot Engine now has its own dedicated Foundation for funding

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The free and open source game engine Godot Engine continues to grow, and now the team behind it has formed a Godot Foundation to continue funding it.

Previously they teamed up with the Software Freedom Conservancy charity, who handled the donations and ensured it was used correctly but as they've constantly grown, they feel the need to run it themselves now. In a blog post from founder Juan Linietsky, they noted having their own organization gives them the "opportunity to explore broader funding sources" while mentioning crowdfunding like Blender and Krita do.

On top of that, a "highly requested" ability for users to be able to sell assets through some sort of asset library, with a share going to the new Godot Foundation. Having merchandise is also an option and other miscellaneous extra forms of funding.

Linietsky also believes that doing all this will "project a stronger image of the Godot Project, which will allow us to have stronger footing when negotiating big donations with donors". Additionally "we want the Foundation to serve as a home for community initiatives, by allowing it to have its own funding lines (this means, so they can raise funding on their own for a specific goal, but the Foundation receives and uses it according to what was agreed), such as initiatives to promote education, communication and diversity".

All sounds reasonable and just goes to show how popular Godot has become that they can now do this. This is all on top of the formation of W4 Games, which is their company to commercially support Godot that raised quite a lot of money recently.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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7 comments

elmapul Nov 2, 2022
i have mixed feelings here.

i liked how things worked under the umbrela of the Software Freedom Conservancy charity, not only the project was developing fine as it was, but they had to be accountable by an thirdy party, in theory this hold then more accountable to invest the money from donnors into the common goods for us, instead of using for something else.
another thing to consider is that they already have the "W4 Games" to act as an "commercial bridge", so having their own foundation looks a bit redundant.

on the other hand, dealing with thirdy parties can have it own problems, if the other foundation had corrupt people for example, who lie about the ammount they received or stuff like that, then there would be little they could do to act uppon it, its better to move sooner rather than later after something happen.

on the other hand, we were helping 2 important projects at once, the free software conservancy who act as an incubator for projects like godot (as far as i understood) and the godot project, now we are helping just one, it feel like a "betrayal" or maybe its just a graduation and that is how the conservancy group suppose to be? an incubator for small projects to be hosted until they can host thenselves, and then the conservancy group is free to help other projects instead?

merchandising
their logo is mega popular, any merchandising based on it should be as well

more on the next comment
elmapul Nov 2, 2022
as for an way to buy/sell assets on the asset store, that is a must have for their ecosystem, competing with unreal and unity isnt easy, people say a lot of things about opensource software, but even an empty text document is an open source software, you just have to write your own code to make the features you want, in other words, being opensource alone dont means much, if you lack too many essential features, then its useless for most people, they cant afford to use your software and write the features they need and it lacks, instead they will be better served using proprietary softwares and making/downloading addons for then or dealing with their limitations in case that is impossible.

comparing unity to godot is akin to compare windows to linux, linux may be better as a system, but the windows ecosystem has more softwares and for many its economically inviable to use linux (they need softwares that only work on windows to pay the bills), the same can be said about some addons for unity, the good news is, as soon as godot get more popular, addon developers might make an version for godot, it happened with blender for example.
elmapul Nov 2, 2022
"we want the Foundation to serve as a home for community initiatives, by allowing it to have its own funding lines (this means, so they can raise funding on their own for a specific goal, but the Foundation receives and uses it according to what was agreed), such as initiatives to promote education, communication and diversity".

this is HUGE, i cant believe i forgot to mention the best part.
Kimyrielle Nov 2, 2022
I'd love to see a well-stocked asset store. Right now Godot seems to be very popular among smaller studios and developers with a more coding than art-oriented background. A place to find/buy assets for Godot would be great.
Kristian Nov 2, 2022
The thing with an asset store is that guven that the engine is open source/free software in theory anyone can set up their own competing asset store. Now that might not be a big worry in practice for example because people want to have everything in one place.
elmapul Nov 3, 2022
Quoting: KristianThe thing with an asset store is that guven that the engine is open source/free software in theory anyone can set up their own competing asset store. Now that might not be a big worry in practice for example because people want to have everything in one place.
actually godot already have an asset store and option to add the url to get stuff from others.
what it lack is an way to do/receive payments on it, and we already have asset stores on some webpages where you can purchase stuff
PublicNuisance Nov 4, 2022
Hopefully they keep Patreon or accept Stripe for one time donations as i'm ditching Paypal. Would be really nice if they went transparent and used Open Collective.
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