First up, do we want to grow the OpenSceneGraph community? My answer would be yes.
Next up is why? Ok slightly longer answer, and only one angle of it - looking it form a standards point of view.
The long term health of the OpenSceneGraph project and perhaps even more critically the wider health of real-time graphics industry. For instance OpenGL is key to the OpenSceneGraph's cleanness of design and portability, if OpenGL dies a slow death then so will portability, choice, competition and professional grade graphics. OpenSceneGraph promotes OpenGL and bolsters OpenGL standing. Members from the OpenSceneGraph community are amoung those who stood up and pushed Microsoft to properly support OpenGL in Vista. These same members are still pushing better scalability.
Consider if we didn't care about standards, and rushed to try and support propritary API's like Direct3D - and that OpenSceneGraph did support Direct 7,8,9,10... would that pressure to make sure OpenGL run well on Vista be still there in the same intensity? Of course not, it would have removed the sting. The same applies to OpenGL drivers under XP, if the OpenSceneGraph support Direct3D then the pressure ATI to properly support OpenGL would be gone, ATI would turn around and just say just use Direct3D and bit by bit erode their OpenGL team till it died. It is very much the case, if you don't support standards they will die.
Standards absolutely critical for the long term health of our industry, the success of the OpenSceneGraph over the years is testiment to this - in a couple of years the project will be a decade old. The OpenSceneGraph software emphatically supports standards, and I'd hope that this rubs off on its users, and that they choose open standards and portability over vendor lock-in where they can. This is both an issue of practicality and philosophy. And if you want to get evangelically about anything is should be that open standards is the "Rightous Path" :-)
For the health of OpenSceneGraph we need healthy standards, and for healthy standards they need to be important to lots of influencial users. Some other software that competes with the OpenSceneGraph also strongly emboddies this philiosphy. OpenSG and Coin3D are both good examples graphics toolkits that stand lock solid on using OpenGL. However, there are other competing toolkits that fall off this path of goodness, and support Direct3D in its various incarnations, thankfully few don't support OpenGL at all. These toolkits undermine OpenGL though, by allowing OpenGL support to be seen as a non critical path by both users, and crucially by vendors like Microsoft, ATI and NVidia.
So for the very health of OpenGL and other open standards we should promote the OpenSceneGraph. This promotion is both in terms of increasing user base and in shouting out that OpenSceneGraph, OpenGL and open standards are critical to the industry and *must* be taken account of and supported fully.
Robert.
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