To facilitate this possibility I have added a template copy constructor and a template assignment operator. These work for safe conversions like those in my previous example, but fail as desired for non-safe conversions since the template instantiation fails during the raw pointer copy/assignment. The lack of this facility has appreciably handicapped development of generic algorithms applied to the scene graph, and I believe that this alteration will be welcomed by most of the community. If there are issues with antiquated compilers not supporting template member functions then perhaps a small piece of conditional compilation is in order. I have made the change using the latest release version (2.6) as the base. The full file is attached. I have not tested building the osg wrappers and the script binding code. I have tested the legal and illegal conversions of both copying and assignment to ensure that behave as expected on MSVC7.1, MSVC8, MSVC9, GCC 4.3."