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PayPalDrama in open source land, as a major conflict has caused many developers to leave GZDoom behind to fork it into UZDoom. It seems like going forward most people will end up using UZDoom.
What actually happened? In the official Discord server that covers ZDoom and related projects, an announcement was put up by a moderator noting "Due to a conflict between GZDoom's lead developer/maintainer Graf Zahl, a lot of other developers decided to leave GZDoom and work on a new fork of the engine now known as UZDoom".
They continued to note that "UZDoom is a direct continuation of GZDoom and will inherit all of its features (and add more eventually)" but the point is that it will have "a more stable development structure with healthy collaboration and less power given to individual 'project leads'".
Pictured - Doom Infinite
Looking a bit further into it, a bug report on the GZDoom GitHub page titled "Project management" was opened that gave a little more detail noting issues with the lead of GZDoom pushing untested code, using an LLM to write code and hiding "not insignificant changes in commits, which has people worried that you'll randomly rip out features that they rely on". In reply, the project lead simply said "Feel free to fork the project under a" (yes, that really all they said).
A later comment before the bug report was locked points out the specific change in GZDoom that was made with ChatGPT.
Really a shame when such incredible projects go through issues like this. Hopefully the ZDoom / UZDoom will come out healthier and stronger from this with a more community orientated approach to the code.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Liam Dawe 3 days ago
not involved into gzdoom in any wayWell, just maybe all the people who are involved and did the nuclear option of forking an established thing know a bit more than you do?
Seeing it in context of how capitalist enterprises normally handle these situations, it no longer feels like a shame to me, it feels like a triumph. FOSStastic!
R Daneel Olivaw 3 days ago
Now, a bunch of years later, libreoffice is THE defacto gold standard, it's used and liked (mostly lol) everywhere, and I haven't even heard of openoffice in an eternity. I did just now look it up, but it looks like abandonware. Apparently Apache runs it? But it hasn't been updated in two years.
I want to highlight Kinsie's comment on GitHub as I think it is very accurate:
The recent progress under the more collaborative, team-based practices of late has been magnificent. It'd be a pity to see that get undermined.
Last edited by Klaas on 16 Oct 2025 at 4:42 pm UTC
UZDoom is a feature centric port for all Doom engine games, based on ZDoom, adding an advanced renderer, powerful scripting capabilities, and forked under a
I'm waiting for DrMcCoy to comment on this and see what he thinks. ^^
Yeah, sorry, I'm a bit late :P. Life has been busy recently, and I haven't followed GoL that closely lately
As for Graf Zahl... Never had any contact with him, so I can't really comment.
(Only that Graf Zahl is the official German name for the Sesame Street character Count von Count. Do with that information what you will :P)
Except that I also really hate the recent push by people to cram "AI" into everything. Especially for code, it's pretty awful. At work, we're constantly prodded to try all the terrible Copilot stuff, because my company is paying for those licenses and the higher-ups are getting hard hallucinating about all the bonuses they could get with the productivity increases. Increases that are of course completely made-up, as what Copilot spits out is without fail bullshit.
You can even see it in the code he commited, to check for "dark mode" on Linux... which, first of all, merely checks if the theme has the word "dark" in it, which is laughable in its own right, and then doesn't even compile. If that account were satirical fiction, everyone would call it out for being too on the nose.
A bad leader is better than chaos, so I hope the vision of "collaboration" this group has understands how to make decisions when not 100% of people involved agree with everything all the time. And, pure democratic (popular vote) decisions are unfair to minority opinions. All these things need to be handled somehow. Why does someone stick around when their ideas aren't included? It's because they know they were listened to and considered. It's because there was enough discussion that they can understand the reasoning behind the decision they didn't choose. It's because they have hope future ideas will be treated with the same consideration. You can't always attach that feeling to a whole group of collaborators. In my anecdotal experience, you can get that feeling from a final decision-maker leader or from a small group, but not really from a large (more than 5 'core' people) group.
A bad leader is better than chaosThese are the only two options?
And, pure democratic (popular vote) decisions are unfair to minority opinions.Whereas a bad leader is fair to no one.
An open source project needs competent leadership to flourish, but that leadership needs to be trusted and respected by the developers. In an open source (volunteer) project, as in a representative democracy, it's up to the leaders to keep that trust by serving that community and proving their worth for the project. This one didn't. We've all heard of "benevolent dictators", but in that phrase only the "dictator" part is optional.
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