Godot team block dev for political reasons
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://x.com/godotfoundation/status/1840721449364988300/pho...
https://x.com/godotfoundation/status/1840721449364988300/pho...
1) On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse.
The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions.
If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes.
We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors.
– The Godot Foundation Board
2) On community moderator Xananax
We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.
We want to clarify that Xananax is not hired by nor a spokesperson for the Godot Foundation.
As an organization, we have our own official Discord server, moderated together with new volunteers vetted by our team.
– The Godot Foundation
I found their responses to be... insufficient and potentially blind to the amount the debacle affected public perception?
What terrible gaslighting here, shifting the blame from their community manager in charge doing the harassments, to the community itself as being the harassers.
If the CM only blocked that one person with the woke comment and kept quiet, everything would have been fine, but instead she kept antagonizing the community using the woke comment as fuel to start a fire based on her own world and political views as if that one comment represented the whole community, so the community told her to drop it and focus on the product instead not on politics, then she started banning all those people.
If one comment of one person is enough for someone to loose their shit and go on a tirade about identity politics on the org's social media account and ban hundreds of people untreated to the offending comment, they must have some rice paper thin skin, low emotional maturity, or untreated mental issues either of which make them unfit for such positions.
I don't know who are on Godot Foundation's board, but as I've mentioned elsewhere: these people might want to lawyer up. This situation may very well have legal ramification, including for them.
Particularly if this was indeed their (only) response, to the events so far. Their attempt to distance themselves for the actions of Xananax, characterized as unofficial and an individual not sanctioned by them, means little if that person was effectively able to exclude access to Gotdot sources (as I’ve read from several sources) and/or at least a substantial part of its community. If the Godot Foundation made this possible by somehow by giving away the keys to their castle, then that's on them; they can (and will) carry the consequences. Even more so if they had any power to at least “freeze” the situation and somehow failed to do so.
Either way ... the tone, character and message of these two tweets sound pretty clear to me. Sad to see Godot go down this road. I always did see plenty of potential in Godot, albeit in need of a lot of work (of which I even considered actively participating at some point).
After this, I think no serious business could/should risk doing business based on Godot. Not after such a lackluster and “it wasn’t us”-style of response. Personally, that was about as dumb a move they could make; also precisely what I hoped they would not do. Two major rules of any successful sustainable business: all ultimately comes down to relationships of trust, where trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback. Godot could just as well have pointed this proverbial gun to their face instead of the foot.
Addendum:
On another level, not just related to Godot and more to all politically/ideologically driven dramas that have done harm to Open Source in general over the last decade or so: It looks like most of these incidents center around geographical regions/cultures (maybe covert commercial interests too), that apparently deem such incidents acceptable (or even weaponized them). Apparently even believing (or at least acting like) people should just move on, without the damage-causing entities facing substantial/material punishment nor be held accountable for the damage done.
This is not about censorship, political/ideological oppression, or what-not in that “department”. This is about people doing damage, yet typically walking away with near-impunity. Many of which having “freedom of speech” as their only excuse, while their actions clearly go way beyond speech. Also, since when did the right not to never be persecuted for speech became a license for saying anything without any consequences?
Most of the push-back against that kind immunity has time and again been framed as just politically/ideologically-driven responses themselves, even if they were obviously not. Unsurprisingly, mostly by those who use politics/ideology as their weapons of choice. Still, why is such framing even accepted in the first place? Since when is doing harm considered acceptable, no matter what kind of political/ideological excuse it’s packaged in? If that fundamental flaw isn’t fixes, on a cultural level, then many people may eventually see increasingly more Open Source (development) moving towards regions/cultures where playing such games isn't (politically/culturally/legally) tolerated. Not because of politics; simply because of business and even societal needs.
Probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, until a whole geographical region gets cut off. Maybe only because too many abuses kept coming from there: arbitrage mitigation and unfortunate guilty-by-association. No doubt sounds like a wild idea now. Would not count on it staying that way.
How the hell did they decide to give such a person such an important publicly facing job is beyond me.
But as seen here it can be also extremely destructive position. Possibly capable of brining down any good will or work done.
You mean their paying customers/donators?
>But as seen here it can be also extremely destructive position.
That's why you should vet those people and not let in those wishing to use their new position to put down others based on disagreements on personal belief.
No matter how lucky you are, everyone's luck streak eventually comes to an end sooner or later.
Has any Open Source product (besides Wordpress, be fair) self-destructed themselves on Twitter before? I didn't use Twitter but none come to mind.
Regardless, from the looks of it so far, this Community Manager should probably be placed on forced leave and be stripped of all privileges, pending a thorough investigation. A psychiatric evaluation might also be warranted. Not because of any political ideology, but simply to assess if this person could and should be held accountable, legally and maybe even financially, for the inflicted damage to Godot as a project/product.
So far, it doesn't look good. Many years of hard work (maybe not so much code development but pretty much everything else) may have been irreparably damaged if not evaporated in mere days. Personally, I've been several times in a position where I considered Godot as the basis for application development. In hindsight I am now relieved I did not, for this drama would have turned that into a serious business liability. I can only imagine the (financial) implications for other companies who did pick Godot as a tech to build part of their business upon. While that may be considered collateral and "just the price of doing business", I'd would certainly hold this individual personally responsible for that damage. While a fork may mitigate some of the damage already done, it is not going to fix what went sideways here.
Based on just a cursory observation from what happened here, there is no doubt in my mind that (regardless of motivation or justification) this individual should never wield this much power, ever again. If Godot leadership does not take these actions back (into their own hands), it may find itself held accountable for the results of this situation. They may want to go find an experienced law firm too. I doubt this will be the end of this drama for them. While Open Source licenses may divert/absolve legal liability for technical/functionality/code-quality aspects, the same might not be true for liability as the result of harm-inducing behavior of individual people (like the kind that appears to have happened here).
If nothing else, let this episode be a lesson for doing proper vetting of people in a position of (potential) power. As most serious businesses know all too well, having anyone with opinions on the extremities of any ideological/political spectrum in a position of power, is typically not a bright idea. Though in this case I’d personally argue it’s a lot worse and appears to involve a mentally unhinged individual. Any reasonable person would have considered and reconsidered the implications of the actions so far taken .. and even then still waited for a considerable body of group consensus would have approved these actions before pressing the red button.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the product.
In any case, they learned the lesson, no one from management responsible for the runtime fee is still at the company, and the runtime fee has been dropped.
Alternatively you have Unreal, LibGDX, MonoGame, FNA, Stride, Murder,..... up to do your own engine.
This type of radical ideology has infested so many companies and open source projects. NixOS, GNOME, Asahi Linux, Elementary OS, Red Hat, IBM...
What is the end goal of these political purges? How is hate speech and discrimination against people who disagree with your political views conducive to an open and inclusive environment? This is the same type of behavior they're criticizing the other side of doing. Not only that, but they're vilifying and excluding people who simply object to this behavior. It's hypocrisy and absolute insanity.
The only purge that needs to happen is of these SJWs from software projects and companies. The only thing they've achieved in the past decade is to stir some shit where there was none, to divide and exclude rather than diversify and include, and to annoy a whole bunch of people in the process. *Stop making everything political.*
I wholeheartedly support the Godot team.
We can't tolerate each other. We can't be friends.
I know some people will tell that people like me are wrong, people like them are wrong, that we are both wrong, but you just need to educate yourself politically.
IMO banning them is silly, but maintaining OSS is not fun and dealing with people who've made politics their whole shtick is even less fun.