@Mikael Strom: It’s sad if the Linux community have that attitude towards regular users (or “lusers” as they might put it). In my experience, that attitude is most common among people who are better at tech than the average user – they know they way in the command prompt, the config files and the forums – but they are not actual programmers.

I think you touched something that is a major show stopper for open source in general, and Linux in particular.

After hanging out on Linux forums for several years, i sense a tech mentality that is quite hostile to “consumer bone heads”. People that press for what is (in my mind) very reasonable functionality are discarded with comments like “well, the developers are quite busy to develop the latest XYZ functionality” (i.e. so go somewhere else and complain), or “all you have to do to get that thing running is just to open a terminal and type in the following 200 commands…”. Linux is, from a technical point of view, a great OS, but from the user point of view, it lacks many very basic things to be worthy a position as a mainstream desktop OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux (and use it exclusively for all our products), but seeing so many small things that most developers avoid to fix in favor of developing “fun” things, makes me very pessimistic that we’ll ever break M$ desktop monopoly.

I totally agree that we can always use better demos, which are programmer art, let’s face it. It’s why I’m very keen to keep the Featureed Projects area stocked with content produced by more balanced teams In a sense, it does what it’s supposed to do though – appeal to developers. If I was selling an end-user tool I’d go about it much differently.

To get non-technical people involved one trick is to get people interested in contributing artwork more and more, as it wil also give them the benefit of showing their talent to wider community helping them in turn, this aspect may be promoted more and featured, with some competetions also, and getiing intersted people in making documentation better. The end result being more people involved.
The simple user generally is after end result which can be viewed quickly. In case of OGRE they are demos. More Demos as a seperate download may be also a better dea with featured screenshots.
Competitions are the best known ancient way to get lots of people interested.

@Ciaran: Following with my exposition, I think Ogre is one of the most affected by this lack of non-technical contributors. While technically it’s a great engine, the demos need, in my honest opinion, a huge artistic touch. In other words, the demos don’t sell the product themselves but to tech-appreciators. Some pro modelers, level designers, etc. would be really helpful to Ogre in that regard. And they don’t have to touch a single line of C++

I guess this is less of an issue with Ogre, given that your users must all be technical.