A question (as usual I don't expect and answer)

Hi !

I still havn't figured this out.

When I say "you" in this text I do mean the folks that is running the show at the moment, I guess that would be the OpenCascade company, (a little information about the future would still be interesting, hint, hint, hint).

You complain that we don't contribute anything to OCC, the one and only time I tried I was told that my changes sounded ok and I should make the changes and send it to you, then you tell me that you are not interested, now I can understand that, that's up to you of course, a lot us "users" of OCC are interested in using it and simply don't have the knowledge to fix bugs in OCC (it's a pretty complex and messy beast +40000 files, a pretty huge part of the comments are in french, if there are any, which in my case makes it a little bit tricky to read.

You don't want to help the ones asking questions on the forum, "let other users do that, we don't make any money on them", but at same time you expect us to contribute to OCC with bug fixes and new features the you can put into OpenCascade and sell to your paying customers, but then you do make money on us, don't you ? and in that case, wouldn't a little help from you folks be valid ?

And even if you don't make any money on us, it does look like you do want people do download OCC and use it (for free), the problem is that a lot of people expect to get help on the forum, the forum is on www.opencascade.org and is managed by the Opencascade company (or is this wrong to ?) but there is no info that you actually will not get any help there (unless you get some from another OCC user, and they can be very helpful but many times lack the required knowledge because many questions are about things that are missing in the documentation), if you do want non paying customers to use OCC then I think you do need to change a few things, don't take my word for it, take a look at the forum and read the last 100-200 message or so (you can ignore the ones from me if you think I am just being a pain in the rear end), there are lot's of questions that are close to impossible to answer without inside knowledge of OCC, and guess what, big surprise, there are no replies to them... but I don't think I am the only one finding this a bit odd, if you arn't interested in the non paying customers, then just say so and make it clear, as it is now people think that you welcome even non paying customers of OCC and that is a very nice gesture of you, but if you intend to do that you do have to go all the way, you can't stop halfway, you will just piss people of and scare them away from OCC without doing any good.

It is possible that I am alone or one of very few that thinks this, but if you look at any other commercial open source project you will find that they only work if the users get professional help (a very good example is the Qt forum www.trolltech.com) just to pick one.

Now I have said that and I must say that I do not have any interest in using OCC in my project as it is at the moment, or to be correct, it wouldn't be possible without a little support or at least good documentation, if I am going to use it I am going to need to more help then what's available at the moment, better support on the forum or improved documentation, I know you don't make any money on me so you don't care, but that's what I mean, either shutdown the whole thing and stick to the paying customers or make something useful out if it, just putting the whole thing up on the internet and expect the user to do all the owrk have never worked and will never do, the only times this work is when the users have control over the software itself (truly non commercial projects that is), it never works with commercial software, if you would give the right support and documentation I think you could expect more contributions and bugfixes from the us to...)

That was my 50 öre (smallest coin in sweden, about $5c)

Mikael