The author seems extremely biased not only by emotion but a misunderstanding of how the world works. If those two are the founders of the company of an open source product, who cares if they raise money? Nothing is owed to the OP or Godot. The rest seems to be about technical disagreements. Again, who cares? Not a reason to accuse someone of criminal activity
If you found a company with the tagline "Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem", speak for Godot, get $8M dollars of funding, and have nothing to show for it (allegedly) for the project then I think the Godot contributors have every right to question what happened to the $8M. And they would care because by contributing they've invested their time and effort on the project.
I'm not familiar with Godot or if the things mentioned in the post have any real merit but reading it as an outsider it's at least not obviously nonsense.
Maybe not fraud or owed anything in the legal sense but does seem crappy if they wasted the money.
Reading Juan's twitter it does seem like the $8M is for W4 games and is not an extension of the Godot project. I still do think it's a bit sketchy that project leaders make a company revolving around their open source project, and then ask for money separately for the project instead of using the funding they got.
EDIT: After a bit of checking, W4 games does seem like they fund Godot as highest tier sponsor: https://fund.godotengine.org/ Which means they must be using their seed fund. The author is probably angry without properly researching things.
The tagline is "Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem _by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need_". Omitting half of the sentence changes its meaning.
W4 Games is a new company created by Godot Engine veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, and veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato.
Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need.
...
W4 Games intends to play an active role in strengthening and professionalizing the Godot ecosystem while remaining as just another citizen of the community, as we believe that Open Source works best when individuals and companies benefit from each other’s contributions on a level playing field. This way, everybody wins and the project benefits as a whole.
We pledge that all the improvements made to Godot as part of the company’s activities will be donated back (whenever legally possible) to the community as pull requests to be reviewed and considered for inclusion.
Additionally, W4 Games pledges to support Godot financially with no-strings-attached donations to the project.
That is just saying that they will be giving some donations to the project. I have zero insight into W4 or the Godot Foundation, but they may have already donated. They don't claim to be the sole financial contributor to the project.
Looks like they do donate: https://fund.godotengine.org/ (W4 games is an icon there as "Platinum Sponsor"). It doesn't say how much but given the amounts in the lower tiers it's probably not entirely insignificant.
So they _are_ actually using their $8M seed fund to fund Godot.
I do wonder if the author of the original post did their research properly. W4 games doesn't need to donate but they do so anyway.
"pledges to support Godot financially" doesn't mean they'll give all of the money they raise.
If anyone has right to be upset about how W4 Games is spending its money, it would be the people who gave it that money. But I doubt the VCs are upset, because the money is going to building a company that might return on their investment.
Later the author makes the point that the funding was secured based on the association with the Godot project, not only the reputation of the founders. That may be naive but it's not unreasonable. It does seem disingenuous for Juan to turn around a few months later and say there is an existential crisis with the project funding. Surely the startup funding at least pays for the core maintainers to continue maintaining.
Now of course, anyone who knows startups knows the founders are suddenly going to be way deep managing a company and not have time to do OSS management. There should have been a plan to delegate responsibilities to a dedicated employee or other member of the community. The lack of time to manage the OSS and the appearance of a conflict of interest is not hard to predict here...
Definitely true, but I don’t agree with “nothing is owed”. If you start a company on the back of an open-source project, you do owe it somewhat, and suddenly abandoning it when it needs support is a very questionable move.
The sad reality is some people prioritize real work and some prioritize hustling and money and do minimum work needed to keep getting money.
I don't know if this is that case, but company's mission is to support Godot ecosystem and if lead maintainer raises millions USD for this and then a few months later says there's no money... it's reasonable to think he pockets it. If he sets the company up so that it's impossible to tell if he pockets it... Another red flag.
If so that would be sus enough that project reputation would be done in my eyes.
