Commarch Conclusion

I think that with any large scale open source problem, there is bound to be some disarray. No one reports to anyone in particular, no one’s going to lose a job if they miss a deadline, everyone is just going to work when they can and when they want. Despite this, open source projects still work, and sometimes they work pretty damn well. I think that Godot is one of those open source projects that, despite being large, still has decently well organized community.

The compiled research and analysis done by my team can be found here. I’m just going to take a minute to add my own thoughts on what was found. Firstly, The way the contributions to the Godot project work is fairly standard. There are any number of contributors who make PRs, and the maintainers will review and close said request. The project avoids having the BDFL issue as there are multiple co-maintainers who all get to make their voice heard in the update process. As for the contributors, the Godot project actually makes it relatively easy to contribute, at least as compared to some smaller projects I’ve found with no readme and no way to contact other developers listed. Inside the projects forge users can find a document on how to contribute whcih explains in pretty simple terms what newcomers can do to help.

On top of this, the issues section of the Godot github page has a lot of useful labels that help newcomers find issues they may be able to help with, going so far as to label some issues as ‘junio jobs’. I think this is super useful for projects of any size. Labels for issues exist for a reason and I do wish that they would be used more often.

After reviewing this and other factors of our project, our team decided that The coefficient of fail was close to 5 points. According to the test it should have been 55 points, but those 50 points came from the fact that the projecft doesn’t use Gmake to build. Firstly, I personally think that there are other feasible build tools that exist out there depending on the project. I think it’s safe to argue away some of the points of fail, especially as it was geared originally towards chromium.

Overall, I think that Godot is doing very well for itself as a project. It’s COF is low, and it is still getting a lot of contributions frequently. I mean, just this year a new version of Godot came out that completely redid it’s 3D rendering capabilities and really put it on the map as a big contender to Unity or Unreal. We’re getting to a point where companies are actively looking at Godot as a possible platform to make commercial games and animation on, so I think the project can only get more popular from here. As for whether this popularity will be too much for the Godot community to adapt to, well, that’s a whole different question.