Week 7 - FOSS Absolutism & Progress on Godot

Thoughts on FOSS & Richard Stallman

I’m a huge proponent of the idea of sharing information and improving together with the people around you as opposed to seeing them as competition. So the idea of just sharing software freely deeply resonates with me.

However, I disagree with Richard Stallman’s free & open source absolutism. There are a lot of benefits to FOSS, and some software should indeed be free, but not all.

Financial rewards are a powerful driver of innovation, and certain situations require software to be closed source for it to be profitable. A lot of great software wouldn’t exist today if the financial incentives wasn’t there. Given the choice, I’d rather have those software as closed source than not have them available at all.

Progress Contributing to Godot

We’re pretty much settled on Godot. We’ve all set up our development environment and compiled the engine from source. I’ve been follwing the official tutorials on the Godot website, and I know my teammates have been getting themselves more familiar with the engine as well. We’ve been looking at issues and discussions forums to gauge different ways we can get started with the contributions.

I think we’ll start with contributions to documentation as it seems like a good starting point, and we’re keeping an eye on issues and feature requests that we feel that are in our reach.

Written before or on March 10, 2024