HI All, I remain curious about the possibility of finding funding routes that would support a dedicated dev team, although also a bit sceptical about the ability for us to draw in enough cash to cover a full time salary for engineer just dedicated to OSG infrastructure/build binaries/website/promotion etc.
Like Paul mentioned we already do have consultant engineers that make living off OpenSceneGraph related services, and these services do often entail directly contributing to the OSG, osgTerrain/VirtualPlanetBuilder/PdfReader/gecok plugin etc. are all examples of this type of funded open source development. The OSG book is also an example of something that had seed funding that helped make it happen. The income for consulting/training/support also allows to put in extra time doing general OSG support work, but this is effectively in our spare time, it's not work we get paid for so there is limit on how much time can be put in in this way. The OSG also gets a lot of contributions from the community in terms of build support/dev support/development work/testing, so in effect lots of companies/groups/individuals are putting effort into the OSG ecosystem. The OSG has a huge number of contributors (over 350) which is a testament to how much contributions do happen. Such contributions tends to rather ad-hoc though, such is the nature of distributed, completely open development. I can't control the flow of submissions in, I can only control how they get merged with our version control system. I also can't dictate what users do in terms of dev work, not that I want to, but it's a very different relationship between a conventional software team manager and his engineers, the only control I have is over what gets checked into svn/trunk, anything else I want to achieve has to be done with good will and co-operation. This current status quo of community/developer isn't perfect, and for a long while I wanted to have an engineer that I could manage full-time and assign to all the project tasks that slip through the net, or only see patchy support, such as providing continuity on tasks like creating binaries are areas that weak. The two problems to tackle to make this happen are 1) Funding 2) Finding the right engineer. I do however think that finding sufficient and consistent funding is pretty difficult to do for a pure support engineer role though. Realistically I think we'd need a couple of companies with deep pockets, or one big company/body that saw strategic benefit from funding OSG dev/support. Such a sugar daddy arrangement is something I hoped for and pursued in the early days of going full-time on the OSG, but now I just concentrate on what I know does work in terms of a open source business model - consulting/training/support. I am a bit of risk adverse character so I've deliberated kept my overheads low, and avoided the temptation of pushing to expand into a larger company, but so far keeping small and tackling things little by little has proven to be a pretty robust business model (I've been in business since March 2001). Personally I feel that the current OSG ecosystem is pretty solid, our software is de-facto standard scene graph in professionally graphics markets, and the community is lively and constructive. Areas where we are weak is not in the pure software dev and community side, it's more getting binaries together, and polishing of our external front to the rest of the world (i.e. our website/marketing ourself.) The solution to getting binaries together can be tackled by making the creation of packages more straight-forward so that we have a pool of engineers that are capable of doing it - coming up with build/packages system that makes the tasks easy to understand and quick to do . This is very much solve the problem with software rather than manpower approach, something that appeals to geeks quite well. Such solutions aren't easy though so don't pop out overnight. On the marketing front, we will do very little pro-actively, it's mainly word of mouth/email having a web presence. While the OSG dominates the vis-sim and virtual-reality markets, and is strong in scientific vis and GIS, we have only made small inroads into the games market. The reason for the modest of penetration into the game market will be marketing, part features, part culture. As an engineer I'm inclined to stick what we are good at - developing software, and bit by bit try and make progress improving our shop front. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
