The purpose of Handmade Hero was to show people that they are capable of making a game themselves and to learn things which have a reputation for being too hard. There was, of course, an emphasis on the hard things being hard because of complexity introduced by things like OOP, C++, etc. But the main purpose always felt like education and enablement. Casey's a great teacher and the videos are very informative.

The Network, on the other hand, was some weird "we want to make stuff by hand", whatever that means. That's fine. But that's not what Casey spent like 7 years doing. He didn't do it "just cuz". Instead, it was to teach and share. That seemed lost on the Network.

As a result, it seemed just like a less toxic Suckless project without the focus on making a new ecosystem. It was just a forum to say, "Hey I made this thing", all the while co-oping the feel-goods from Casey's Handmade Hero.

>The number one goal of the Handmade Software Foundation is to support, promote, and sustain the development of Handmade software.

I would love some concrete ideas what this means. My primary concern is that if any money is involved, like stipends for handmade software it will be gamed and there is no way to monitor if LLMs are used or not. In current world it is hard for me not to be cynical when I heard about new good thing, but also they are asking for money and they don’t really tell what they will do with it

I get that, but I don't understand why it supports a 501(6) in this case[1].

Just because others have abused it doesn’t mean you should give up on it. Even if it's only about sending the right signal, that still matters.

Or is this about brutal honesty and they are saying bluntly: We're not a charity, so don't expect us to act like one in the first place.

If it is that, then why would anyone support them apart from their sponsoring organizations?

EDIT: Reading the whole thing carefully, I think they are going for an exclusive club. I genuinely wish them well, but to me it looks like a quite quixotic endeavour.

[1] There are many cases where a 501(6) makes sense. I'm strictly arguing the "Handmade Software Foundation" case here. Otherwise it gets complicated quickly.