Hi there. As a long time OpenSG user, I'm a bit worried about the state of OpenSG. Some months (years?) ago, there was a lengthy discussion on this list about the (bad) marketing of OpenSG. Unfortunately, it never was worse than it is today.
If I would be a new user (not knowing this mailing list) I would consider OpenSG dead, for the following reasons: * "Googling" OpenSG points to opensg.org that contains "News" about SIGGRAPH 2006(!) and points to a new Website that is unreachable for about 3 months now. * There's a source forge website http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensg also in the google results that contain 2 ratings, one of them just stating "dead". Considering that the "daily builds" you can fetch from that website are from July 2007, that's not very surprising. * The last official release 1.8 in 2007. Tons of features have been added since then but nobody knows about them. OpenSG 2 will be released "really soon" for at least 2 years now. The well known other scene graph with the very similar name had 5 releases - in 2009 only. To quote Joel Spolsky here: "Real artists ship!" * Without knowing the actual IP address, it's currently not even possible to checkout / update the the 2.0 source code repository. * There are no ready to use builds for 2.0 all - although one gets used to compile OpenSG (doing this since the old 1.2 days), this is really annoying, takes lots of time and definitely keeps away users that want to give it a try. Long story short, it's the same old rule: What good is an awesome product if there's nobody out there who buys/uses it? Please keep in mind that there are not only academic users out there who write what I usually call "fire and forget" research code but also companies (like ours) that chose OpenSG as a base for their commercial development. Getting employees into OpenSG is a major investment (mainly because of the still pretty poor documentation). This is/was a major platform (and thus business) decision and seeing OpenSG going down the drain really gives me the creeps. So please... ... let the world know that OpenSG is still alive * update or shut down opensg.org * update or shut down the source forge project site * get opensg.vrsource.org back online ... feature fix and release. And release more often! ... document! .. announce new features (just discovering something like DeferredRenderingStage in the svn logs is not what I consider a new feature annoncement) If you need help (web space, web design, machines for daily builds, documentation, domain registrations...) let us (the community) know - I'm sure that there are more people out there willing to help. However, you (the core team) have to coordinate that. Yours, Dominik ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Opensg-users mailing list Opensg-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opensg-users
