kamenges
Member
I think one thing that is somewhat obvious is this would have to be a 'labor of love' out of the open source community. As Nathan already stated the unknown part of this could have been done already by the brute force method. The fact that it hasn't just means that no one sees the ultimate return on investment. The market for a given plc programming software is just too small. And the end users are generally a pretty conservative group. It would be hard to make them change. If I was writing this software for the fun of it I wouldn't care if it was accepted. If was was doing it to put food on the table I would politely walk away.
Open source projects will by implication always be stuck in alpha/beta phase. Who governs product release until someone takes a particular version and goes commercial with it? While I do agree that open source doesn't necessarily mean buggy junk I do question the amount of commitment required to get a piece of open source software to the reliability level of any of the major plc players' programming packages. I'm not saying it can't be done. I just find it hard to believe that it would be. A program that correctly models global warming or hurricane paths, maybe. A program that helps program a special purpose industrial computer, not so much. There's just not enough *** in that.
Keith
Originally posted by surferb:
Just because most industrial Open Source projects are stuck in early Alpha/Beta phases, doesn't mean that AB software is any better or that another project couldn't be.
Open source projects will by implication always be stuck in alpha/beta phase. Who governs product release until someone takes a particular version and goes commercial with it? While I do agree that open source doesn't necessarily mean buggy junk I do question the amount of commitment required to get a piece of open source software to the reliability level of any of the major plc players' programming packages. I'm not saying it can't be done. I just find it hard to believe that it would be. A program that correctly models global warming or hurricane paths, maybe. A program that helps program a special purpose industrial computer, not so much. There's just not enough *** in that.
Keith