One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.
So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.
Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user – the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.
Thanks for your time!