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.
Also we might want to grow the community and its influence for more OpenSceneGraph centric issues. As new members join the community, so do new testers and contributors to help with improving the quality of the code.
About 14% of the OpenSceneGraph community are also contributors, many is small ways, but some are pretty significant contributors, this percentage has actually increased a little of the last year despite the project growing and becoming more "mature". So for every new 100 members, we typically get 14 new contributors. Those new contributors might just spot and fix an annoying bug that has plagued you, and spot a better way of doing things.
New members of the community also bring opportunities for those of who make a living of professional services on top of the OpenSceneGraph. While our business are doing the better we are able to sustain our commitment to working purely on OpenSceneGraph related projects. Some of these paid for services also are for open source work which get contributed to the OpenSceneGraph project itself, so it is doubly healthy for the project as a whole.
What about the worry of overloading on support? Despite steady growth over the last few years or around one new developer a day, the support load of osg-users has levelled off, bubbling around at 1000 posts a month. Noisy yes, but so far manageable. Things like a books and better online documentation will also help keep a lid on support as things grow.
So alround I'd say growth is a good thing.
Robert.
_______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
