Godot’s Graduation: Godot moves to a new Foundation
When Godot was first open-sourced in 2014, it was a very small project mostly developed by Ariel and Juan. Even after open-sourcing, contributions to Godot were almost exclusively made by volunteers. Over time, and to our surprise, many users expressed a wish to contribute financially to the project to speed up development.
Creating a foundation at the time would have been too costly and difficult, so we turned to Ton Roosendaal for advice. Ton introduced us to the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which is a charity located in New York.
The SFC was a fantastic fit for Godot. They work as a non-profit home for several high profile FOSS projects (such as Git, Samba, Wine, etc) and they have tested and proven rules to ensure that donations are only used for the benefit of projects, as well as rules to avoid conflicts of interest. They allow open-source projects to grow and prosper and focus on their project while the SFC handles non-profit governance, accounting, and legal issues (including successfully walking back on Non Disclosure Agreements to ensure that all our work can happen in the open); essentially aggregating the work required for the operation of a not-for-profit organization.
SFC's response:
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Announcing Godot's Graduation from SFC! - Software Freedom Conservancy
The Godot Game Engine joined Software Freedom Conservancy in 2015, and we're incredibly proud of their growth and improvement since then, empowering people everywhere to make their own games. The team that they have in place funded by the project for this work and the level of resources that the project has grown to need, now means that it is time for them to start their own independent organization. Working with them has given us so much hope for the future of software freedom in the game design and creative space, in which they play such a vital role. We can't wait to see their new organization thrive.