Many developers leave GZDoom due to leader conflicts and fork it into UZDoom

Drama 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.