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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged Godot
A brief introduction to the Godot Engine with Juan Linietsky, Lead Developer
by on December 28, 2020
Godot is a free-and-open-source game engine that seeks to provide an accessible, common set of tools for 2D and 3D game development. Unlike its proprietary counterparts, Godot uses the MIT license, allowing creators to exercise full agency and ownership over the products of their work, letting them focus on developing unique games on a complete, free foundation. Godot provides integrated tools for developers to work on game graphics, physics, audio, and more, and can be used to deploy games to a wide range of platforms, including the desktop, mobile platforms, the web, and several game consoles.
Godot demo screenshot, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Godot has been a Conservancy member project since 2015. Vladimir Bejdo, a Conservancy intern, conducted a remote interview with Juan Linietsky, the engine's Lead Developer, for a quick update on the work Godot is doing now five years after it joined the Conservancy and to gain some insights on the project's future.
JL: Juan Linietsky; VB: Vladimir Bejdo
VB: Juan, tell me a bit about how you got into free software to begin with – was there a particular moment or experience you could relate back to which makes free software important to you and informed this project’s libre status?
JL: I used Linux for programming since around 1997, so I was always very comfortable with free software tools. I also wrote some music composing hardware many years ago and licensed it as free software. Initially, as Godot was not meant be a commercialized product, it was put online as open source with the hopes that others would contribute.
VB: Tell me a bit about the history of the Godot Engine – what drove its creation? Why make it free software?
JL: Godot was my (and Ariel Manzur's) in-house game engine for a long time. We used it to create technology for a diverse amount of clients in the past. This was done at a time where game engines were not accessible and one needed to create the technology on your own. Because it was never meant to be a product, we open sourced it.
VB: Godot aims to provide an open, accessible, permissively licensed game engine – it would be easy to say that for many end-users and emerging developers, games are often a point of first contact with software – what kind of work does the project do to make what can often be people’s first introduction to development work accessible, and how does free software philosophy work into those aims?
JL: Godot development priorities are always very user oriented. Taking feedback from users is more important than just adding features for the sake of it. When we see users have issues with something, we try to work around it to ensure a better experience.
VB: Developing something like a game engine is somewhat of a herculean task – how has peer/community production contributed to the project’s success so far? How does the project converge with other free software projects in existence?
JL: Coexistence with other free software projects is a bit difficult. Godot does mostly not make heavy use of other open source software as a base, and instead we write our own versions of things. This is because generally we have very precise needs to solve; it's easier to roll out our own solution than doing politics with other projects to see how to work together. So, unless a library we use is exactly what we need, we tend to roll out our own. Things may take longer, but Godot becomes a lot more consistent as a result.
VB: What do you see for the future of your project as a whole?
JL: To be honest I have no idea, we are constantly running behind because it's growing so fast. I am really hoping for a time where we can work more on stabilizing the codebase and fully focusing on user experience.
VB: Would you be willing to share any use-cases of games created in Godot?
JL: Feel free to take a look at our showreel. We have lots of very beautiful looking games.
VB: Speaking more generally – what do you see for the future of free and open source software as a whole?
JL: I have mixed experiences as an open source software user myself. I am of the thinking that user experience is important when you write software, and that you should listen to your users in order to improve what you are doing. In my opinion, the biggest flaw open source software has is when the authors believe they know better than their users or other potential contributors. This hampers their ability to grow as a community. I really hope this eventually changes in the future in open source software.
VB: The Godot Engine has been a Conservancy member project for a few years now – what has changed since the Engine joined the Conservancy? How has Godot – as a project, and its community – grown over the past few years?
JL: The success of Godot as a project would have been impossible without Conservancy. The work they do to support projects in a way where they can receive donations and the way they are transparent and ensure that all funding is used for the benefit of the project is key to gaining trust with users, contributors, patrons and sponsors. It would be impossible for the project to finance itself without their help.
VB: Any closing remarks? Say someone reading this review were interested in getting involved with Godot – besides supporting the Conservancy, how might they do that?
JL: Besides thanking Conservancy again for all their help and support, I would love to invite anyone interested in taking part of the development to read our documentation page about ways to contribute.
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Last Week in Brussels: FOSDEM, Copyleft Conf and More
by on February 10, 2020
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is a great volunteer-run, community-driven event that has been going on for twenty years!! Conservancy staff and volunteers who attend the event are grateful to have the opportunity to interact with so many passionate free software advocates in one place each year.
The FOSDEM organizers invited Bradley and Karen to speak on the main track talk — the next installment talk on the difficulty in living in software freedom and making ethical choices today — a follow-up to their keynote from last year.
Conservancy staff also gave some DevRoom talks, including participating in the one-of-a-kind debates in the Legal & Policy DevRoom this year. Nearly all of these recordings are now available. The FOSDEM video team is amazingly efficient — with a fully FOSS system for conference video!
The well-attended Legal & Policy DevRoom (which Bradley and Karen help organize each year) occurred all day on Saturday. In the morning, Bradley participated in a debate entitled, Does Careful Inventory of Licensing Bill of Materials Have Real Impact on FOSS License Compliance? The debate format was an exciting new addition to the DevRoom this year. (Please note that per the debate format, some speakers took positions that did not necessarily reflect their personal or organizational views.)
On Sunday, Deb spoke about Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism, in the Community Devroom. Later that day in the same room, Bradley Kuhn discussed, How Does Innersource Impact on the Future of Upstream Contributions?.
On Sunday, Conservancy welcomed attendees to learn more about our organization at our booth. We thank our volunteers who greeted and discussed Conservancy's work with attendees; we appreciate your energy. Also, thanks to the many Outreachy alums (all of whom are still participating in FOSS!) who stopped by the booth — it's really gratifying to hear from you. One current intern even asked for a selfie with our staff!
Many of our member projects were also at FOSDEM. Coreboot ran a shared booth, Homebrew had their second in-person meeting on Monday and Godot had a booth and helped run the Gaming Development track.
Godot also hosted two pre-conference sprint days and a two day “FOSDEM Fringe” event — GodotCon.Copyleft Conf
Photo is by Deb Nicholson and is available under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license
We ran the Second Annual Copyleft Conf on Monday. The event sparked lively and respectful conversations about the use and future of copyleft. The event included an exciting, multi-faceted schedule of talks and panels. Our lovely program committee — Molly de Blanc, Nithya Ruff, Harald Welte, Josh Simmons, Beth Flanagan, Bradley Kuhn and Deb Nicholson — curated and selected excellent content for the day. Thanks also to our Copyleft Conf volunteers, who helped with registration, speaker introductions and time-keeping.
All the Copyleft Conf sessions and Deb's CHAOSS Con keynote (a Friday “FOSDEM Fringe” event), Ethics: What You Know & What You Don't Know should be posted within a few weeks.
Conservancy News Round-up
by on May 28, 2019
May is for code releases! Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Recent Videos and Podcasts
Deb's talk on Free Software/Utopia is up, on the Free software Foundation's MediaGoblin server.
Deb was also the guest of honor on Libre Lounge, Episode 19: Community Development with Deb Nicholson. Thanks to Chris and Serge for their dedication to free software and to Conservancy's work!
On Free as in Freedom, Karen and Bradley discuss two additional permissions that can be used to “backport” the GPLv3 Termination provisions to GPLv2 — the Kernel Enforcement Statement Additional Permission, and the Red Hat Cooperation Commitment.
Our Member Projects Have Been Busy
This summer's Outreachy interns were announced. "Congratulations to the 43 interns accepted to the Outreachy May 2019 to August 2019 round!"
phpMyAdmin -- along with several other Conservancy projects -- are excited about participating in Outreachy this round.
MicroBlocks presented at ROBOLOT, an educational robotics conference held in Catalan. The video of their panel is about 75% Catalan and 25% English, so feel to skip around or brush up on your Catalan.
The Godot team attended GDC, aka the "Game Developers Conference" in San Francisco reported on their improved name recognition at this year's event.
The folks at Reproducible Builds, shared" that security and software supply chain attacks were in the news and that this was a busy month for their distro work.
Some recent code releases:
- Kallithea 0.4.1 released
- Mercurial 5.0 released
- QEMU 4.0 adds micro:bit emulation support
- Samba 4.10.4 available for download
- SWIG-4.0.0 released
- Wine 4.0.1 released
Etherpad merged in a big chunk of code to improve recovery from brief server outages. "The resulting code is 15% smaller than before, and is also much easier to comprehend."
What's coming up?
Catch up with staff:
Karen keynotes sambaXP on June 5th at 10:15 local time in Göttingen, Germany.
Bradley will be at the Ninth Annual RacketCon in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he will give a talk titled, "Conservancy and Racket: What We Can Do Together!"
Many of our projects have events coming up:
In addition to the aforementioned sambaXP and RacketCon...
First talks are announced for Selenium's upcoming London conference, tickets are available now.
North Bay Python has announced their dates for this year's event, November 2 & 3, 2019. Talk submissions will open soon!
Conservancy News Round-up
by on April 17, 2019
Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Recent Videos
- Bradley and Karen during their keynote at FOSDEM, "Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today? Confessions of Activists Who Try But Fail to Avoid Proprietary Software"
- Microblocks in use (it's in Catalan, but the smiling faces are understandable in any language!)
- Deb keynoted Gitmerge, "The Future of Free Software"
- Godot engine in use! These are from published games and games in development. Check out the Desktop / Console showreel and the Mobile Showreel.
- Bradley gave a talk at SCaLE, "If Open Source Isn't Sustainable, Maybe Software Freedom Is?" that got written up on LWN.
- The State of Godot address by Juan Linietsy
Our Member Projects Have Been Busy
- Outreachy getting ready for another round of interns! You can see the projects that are participating in this summer's program here.
- Lots of Reproducible Builds work in March
- Godot is receiving a MOSS Grant
- Inkscape's SCALE17x Hackfest 2019 launched plans for 1.0 release and more
- Recent Clojurists Together work funded through Conservancy
Some recent code releases:
What's coming up?
Catch up with staff:
- Deb speaks about governance at Open Source 101 on Thursday
- Swing by Bellingham to say hi to Bradley at our Linuxfest Northwest booth later this month
- Deb speaks about diversity at Red Hat Summit in May
Many of our projects have events coming up:
- Selenium Conf in Tokyo
- Ninth Annual RacketCon, plus Bradley will be there.
- Samba XP -- Karen is keynoting!
- One week blocks workshop for public school teachers, "Physical Computing with the BBC micro:bit"
- Teaching Open Source planning a summer POSSE meeting
Bonus news! GPLv3 code made the famous black hole picture possible. Congrats to Doctor Katie Bouman and her team!
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