Rémi VerscheldeSince I'm now official working as project manager and representative for #GodotEngine, I wrote a bit about what that means:
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-project-management-101
Benjamin@akien congratulations! I'm glad things are going well, and that we finally live in a time were patronage is a viable solution for software projects.
juulcat@akien Congrats!
goalou@akien Félicitation👍
Aras Pranckevičius@akien congrats!
The Seven Voyages Of Steve@akien congrats, this is something I tried to achieve 10 years ago with Ogre but never managed it, there was just no tradition of committing to regular donations back then, just ad-hoc ones you couldn’t rely on. Thank goodness for Patreon making it a thing now!
@sinbad Thanks!
It's definitely much easier to achieve today than it used to be, both thanks to platforms like Patreon, but also to 10 more years of software innovation leading to the game engines we have today like Unity, Unreal or Godot.
The ease of use means that we can have a much bigger user base, and thus a bigger pool of potential donators for a donation-driven engine like Godot.
Still, it's still baby steps towards sustainability. Godot is developed by over 50 core contributors, and we can now afford to pay 2.5 FTEs for the most critical part (lead dev, project manager and part-time dev for flagship feature of next milestone). But there's only so much we can do with donations.
The next step would be for thirdparty companies to hire contributors and let them use part of their work time for upstream dev. Some started mentioning it, so it's going in the right direction :)
I don't know how was the upstream structure for Ogre back then, but I think it definitely helps for us that we're sponsored by a recognized nonprofit (Software Freedom Conservancy), as indie users (and increasingly, small and medium companies) know that they're not just sending bucks to one person, but to the project as a whole to be best allocated in the interest of all users (Conservancy guarantees that, as they have to approve how we use our funds).
beocat@akien
Congrats with the job!
Congrats with the job!