It's a reasonable to say that W4 has its own obligations, though just based on that snippet on the home page it's hard to say what the extent and constraint of those obligations are w.r.t Godot. I don't think it's necessary (or fair to Godot) to assume that stable revenue for W4 is a requirement.

I am not involved in this ecosystem nor do I have the whole history of it to say if there were any broken promises. I guess then it's up to the responsible parties to hammer out misunderstandings with their open source developers (who I feel for). Clearly there are mismatched expectations around.

I agree that there seems to be some mismatched expectations around, but I don't get why. Why should the expectation be that the seed funding from VCs to found a startup would serve as donations to the Godoy Foundation? If so, why? Nothing in TFA even mentions anything which could be construed as promises to that effect.

Now what would truly be a scam is if the founders of W4 raised $8m of seed funding based on false promises, then donated all that cash to the Godot Foundation instead of developing the products which were pitched to the investors. I genuinely don't understand why there's apparently an expectation from at least some people that W4 would do that, or why so many people here (you included!) think that's a remotely reasonable expectation.

It's a good question, isn't it? Why does the Godot community (and not just OP) feel like they did "work for free". I've seldom come across this kind of sentiment elsewhere in opensource, so I am wondering why in this case there are mismatched expectations. Like I said, as an outsider I can't speak to any of this properly as I don't have more context. I am keeping an open mind either way, you may completely right in assuming that there were no promises made (legal or otherwise) that gave rise to this kind of expectation misalignment. The point I am making is this: regardless of the separation of Godot Foundation and W4, if the goodwill and work of the community was used to ensure some kind of future for W4, then it makes sense to pay that back in kind.

That's a good question. I'd assume "work for free" could be more accurately worded as "taken advantage of". After all, the vast majority of FOSS projects involve unpaid labor, and no one complains about "working for free" in FOSS.

What I mean is this: when a FOSS project is entirely community funded, one's hard work is just giving back to the community. But once a profit is made by the project, your hard work should now be compensated. Otherwise, you're being taken advantage of. For the forum OP, they're probably coming from the view of "why should Juan (and others) get paid for shipping half complete features when I'm not just paying out of pocket for the server everyone uses, but trying to help as best as I can (bug reports)?" After all, $8M for W4 is supposedly gone while Godot itself is in the negative every month? On the surface, that looks sketchy.

There is a bit of entitlement in such a thought, I'd argue, but it's not completely unjustified.

For another example, Linux's and Blender's main developers get paid, but they're the exception to the rule. Any community involvement in the form of patches and bug reports are all unpaid. But people don't complain about that because the Linux Foundation and the Blender Foundation are both non-profits. W4, however, is a for-profit. So, millions are going to a for-profit organization while the people working on the non-profit side languish.