Meeting of OCCT enthusiasts

Dear Colleagues!

- I dared to support Pawel’s initiative with my below comments which (I need to emphasize this point!) is my personal opinion and position and sure could not be considered in any way as the position of Open CASCADE Company (OCC) management.

- This stuff was already published on the Linkedin Open Cascade Group forum, so I am sorry in advance, if someone has read it.

- Perhaps I am pushing it a bit forward with the below details, but the devil is in the detail, as a rule. Nevertheless, I do hope, it will be much easy to make personal decisions in favor of Pawel’s idea if these details are taken into consideration too.

1. In general I would be happy to see regular conference/forums dedicated to Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) resulted from the common efforts of OCC team and the Open Source Community (OSC). I see many perspectives of such meetings for OCCT adepts from the OSC: starting from the most critical points (roadmap, key functionalities to be revises/developed) and up to particular best practices in OCCT usage in OSC users’ projects. Therefore I see an extremely wide field for our mutual working sessions that could be very interesting for both the OSC and the OCC team.

2. Practicing mutual working sessions (both conferences and one-to one meetings) we need to have an absolutely clear understanding of the meeting content and its objectives well in advance. Moreover we must have something tangible on the table - the materials to be presented should be well prepared and audited by the OSC and OCC experts in advance. So, above the Good Will of OCC, adequate reactivity, advanced efforts and some (I anticipate quite valuable) spent working time of particular Open Source Community experts are above all. And this resource in this context is much more valuable than OCC initiative and the OCC Good Will.

3. As a pragmatic guy, I am not sure at all that we can find (at least in the nearest future) any business agents (sponsors strong enough) from the OSC with the adequate available financial resources who will be able to take in charge organization of such conferences in the full scale mode, especially in the context of adequate frequency, that is IMHO only worth considering: I guess such meetings will be nice to have at least annually.
There could be no problem probably for OCC to organize (lead and manage) such event once. But, I guess, if we plan to run such meetings on a regular basis, both OCC shareholders and OCC Customers, who are under the hard pressure and restrictions of the current crisis environment, could be finally a bit disappointed with the way OCC spends its shareholders’/customers’ money :-) . So I suggest we should not fall into too much optimistic expectations, and need to admit that OSC members should be ready at least to cover their traveling and lodging expenses on a regular basis. I am awfully sorry for such a straight forward consideration, but it would be much better to put this aspect (a restriction, in fact) on the table in advance for the common consideration.

4. IMHO the best way to start up such meetings could be OCC commitment (that I guess would be very appreciated by OSC) to undertake the responsibility for this meeting organization in the first quarter of the next year and it could be great if OCCT adepts from the OSC provide their Good Will support to OCC in sharing costs.