Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 162 posts

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#21

Post by phoronixrly »

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing.

Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expenses necessary to develop it. In the end, you've contributed to closed source and on top of that you got nothing in return... And that is the best case, as we saw with log4j, you can be held responsible in the court of public opinion in case the project you developed and maintain for free (with no warranty or liability as per license) causes an issue...

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#22

Post by [deleted] »

pyb wrote: post #20
smarx007 wrote: post #15

I have observed two common reactions in companies not willing to sponsor open-source: 1. "Do you mean we will pay money to develop software for our competitors? Murder!" 2. The OSS donations are not seen as business expense but as charity. "We don't do charity." What we found effective so far is an OSS project, a consulting company and a consulting arrangement where any modifications to the core project will be upstr…

Who is "we"? Projects such as VLC tried the consulting approach, but didn't get the outcomes that they'd hoped for.

[deleted]

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#23

Post by jarym »

There’s a reason why the majority of costs in running a tech business are often in the non-technical parts.

Don’t open source unless you can afford to. Invest in non-technical bits of your organisation. Avoid making choices and then hating the consequences.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#24

Post by onion2k »

progbits wrote: post #18
pabs3 wrote: post #13

It seems like something that should be backed by an industry consortium; member companies pay money to the foundation and that employs the author and other folks to work on the code etc.

I'm probably missing something but why would the industry back this? This makes it easier to combine and switch between manufacturers while they probably prefer vendor lock-in. Once a factory starts using your PLC it will continue buying replacements and upgrades forever. I only had brief exposure to this domain years ago, working on a single Siemens PLC control project. The whole software stack was utter garbage (GU…

I'm probably missing something but why would the industry back this?

The device manufacturer side of the industry probably wouldn't back it. The people who do the integration work would though. They're the ones who actually benefit from it.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#25

Post by jcelerier »

phoronixrly wrote: post #21

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expens…

as usual when it's about free software licenses, https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright

> In the end, you've contributed to closed source

yes, that's exactly what using the GPL is supposed to prevent

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#26

Post by wiseleo »

CaptainJustin wrote: post #9

This is dangerously close to being off-topic but it would be good to hear from people interested in PLC4X: I would really like to see home appliance manufacturers extend their products with a simple 2.n IO pin interface at the back. Absolutely minimal. For example: a kettle could have an input pin to turn it on/off and an output pin that just writes whether it is on or not. A simple 4-pin interface on the back in thi…

I am interested in that, but my approach is more of a modchip on top of the existing board. It's not that difficult to intercept SPI and I2C in-circuit and thus enable IoT capability for legacy appliances.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#27

Post by charcircuit »

phoronixrly wrote: post #21

Developments like this one and the faker.js and colors.js fiasco from last week have made me rethink my position about licensing. Now it seems to me that releasing code you wrote for free under a permissive open-source license is somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. On one hand it will not benefit you in any way, on the other, it will be incorporated in a company's proprietary project thus lowering the expens…

What's wrong with lowering the time it takes to develop closed source software? Closed source software solves people's problems. By making it easier to make, more of people's problems can be solved. There can be less time spent where multiple people remake the same exact thing over and over again.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#28

Post by jpfr »

There's quite a bit of OPC UA bashing across this project. So let me chime in to keep the "balance in the universe".

OPC UA is a protocol to interact with an object-oriented information model. Basically CORBA done right to use object-oriented principles and reuse software components in industrial automation.

Since OPC UA is a protocol, its performance depends mostly on the implementation. Some PLCs may be crappy. But that doesn't translate into bad performance overall. My experience goes to the exact contrary.

Full disclosure, I lead-develop and maintain an open source OPC UA implementation that sees quite a bit of use by the big guys in the automation domain. We use C for performance. And we do have funding from the industry.

https://github.com/open62541/open62541

But yes, it is hard to break into this world. Especially since solutions have to be maintained for 20+ years. A solo developer usually cannot ensure that this will still be usable some years down the line.

Re: Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

#29

Post by qwertox »

Just quoting this snippet from the landing page:

"No license costs, no restrictive licenses. Being open source, PLC4X is free of charge. Start experimenting without worrying about license costs or shady license agreements. The Apache 2.0 is one of the worlds most trusted and adopted open source licenses out there."

Big companies need to grow up and start contributing with serious amounts. I wonder how this could get regulated with a law, for example that any company with more than x in revenue must pay y percent to an open software foundation. Maybe one needs to be created, one which monitors the space and ranks the projects on some metric like pull requests or issues closed. Then the rank is a ratio of the amount they get.

Post reply on HN