Hello,
most people haven't seen me on this list, i suppose, but i've been wathcing it seomwhat, since i've been developing on top of osg myself until about 2-3 years ago [unfortunately, i don't have the time any more ;-( ], and i even seem to recall that i wrote 1-2 lines of the earliest osg-version myself ;-) > What I am about to say may be flamebait, I don't know, but it has so let me share some of the flames you might be getting ;-) > OpenSceneGraph is growing by leaps and bounds. They have nearly 200 has it really? i mean, feature-wise? i agree perfectly that the user base as well as the contributer list seems to be growing much much quicker. Which is, per se, a danger to opensg, of course. > contributors to the codebase and have more plugins on the way. I > highly > suggest that any OpenSG developer take a detailed look at the OSG > website to get an idea of what they are up to. As they say, know your i did, but what are they up to? i couldn't find anything significant ... [besides, the developer of the collada contribution is seeking someone taking over ;-) ] > enemy. I know we don't often think of other open source projects > as the > "enemy", but remember that every user and contributor on > OpenSceneGraph > is one less for OpenSG. that's the crucial observation here. > > But back to OpenSG. I have a simple question: What is the goal of > OpenSG and the OpenSG developers? and that is the most important, crucial question with regards to opensg's future. > > Is the goal to have a codebase to do research? To work on fun > projects > on the side? Or is the goal something large like to create the most > widely used open source graphics scene graph? it was my impression from the very beginning, that open-scene-graph was much more focused on gaining a wide user base. And this is one of the reasons, i think, that open-scene-graph has now reached (or, is close to reaching) a critical mass. > For example here are a short list of some of the symptoms I see. > - No roadmap describing what needs to be done and who is working on > it and no urgency to make progress. well, i think the core developers are making their best efforts, but they are, of course, fast tied up to other "bread and butter" projects ... > - Relatively few contributors. There are several core contributors > but very few community members contributing small bits of code. yes, that's one of the other big problems IMHO. The big question is: why is that? IMHO (and that's nothing new to the core developers) the core code is way too contrived. it's not according to the KISS principle. > - Relatively few people in the graphics community know about > OpenSG. that's the other big problem: marketing. again, i think the core developers are only partially to blame, because marketing (i.e., traveling to conferences and giving talks about opensg, writing tutorials or making other people write them, talking to companies, etc.) is a full-time job. > - Many things never get completely done. (FLT loader, > experimental code) is open-scene-graph better in that respect? > - Relatively difficult to build and install. yes. > - Need to get OpenSG into Fedora Extras and Debian (like > OpenSceneGraph) again, that's a marketing issue, which is related to the fundamental question you asked at the beginning: what is the plan for opensg? > - No promotion of new features dito. > - The webpage is confusing and hides the important information. It > is just hard to navigate. > - No where does it say, "This is why you should use OpenSG" and > "This is how it compares to scene graph XXX" again, that's marketing ... > Sorry about all these, but I think it would be hard to say any of > it is > not true. :( yes. i think, we also need an answer to the question as to why the user base is so small. Marketing is one problem, i suppose. The other, IMHO is that the API is too arcane. What do you think? > > As a side note, I think that the reason for the current state of > things > (and correspondingly the reason that OpenSceneGraph is succeeding) is > that as far as I know there is no one whose livelihood directly > depends > upon OpenSG. There is no one whose full-time job is OpenSG > development > and consulting. OpenSceneGraph benefits greatly in that Robert and > Don > have to make OpenSceneGraph succeed and work or they don't have an > income to support their family. That is a great motivator for > success. that is a very good observation. > Call to action i agree with your ideas. but, i think, the first thing that must be answered is the question "playground or significant market share?" i would put most effort on enlarging the long-term users base. we've had lots of PhD users and developers but eventually they're gone. > In closing I would like to say again, I love OpenSG. It is > technically so do i. > I put the slides up at http://www.dirkreiners.com/ > OpenSG2006_BOF.pdf and speaking of marketing -- why didn't you put them on opensg.org ? Best regards, Gabriel. _________________________________________________________________ If you know exactly what you will do -- why would you want to do it? (Picasso) _________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Opensg-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opensg-users
