W4 link does say, in its title, that the money raised was for “Godot Engine Growth”.
From reading through the forum thread replies (I’m not familiar), it sounds like W4 is a separate legal entity than the Godot foundation, and the $8.5M in question is from commercial investors.
If true, then it would literally be fraud to use that $8.5M for other than it’s intended purpose, which unfortunately seems to mean something different than actually working on the Godot engine itself.
Yep. The communication about funding could be way better from Godot, but this forum maintainer is at best naive, if not completely delusional.
They don’t understand how hard running a large open source project is:
I get that it’s frustrating seeing a new version of software not fix your problems, but this person really just doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They have some legitimate concerns/complaints, but calling it a scam so publicly is just completely ridiculous.