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Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding

290 points by schlotzisk 5y ago

plcguy 5y ago
Too bad. There's not too many PLC projects out there. There's Inxton, TcOpen and few guys doing it in Beckhoff TwinCAT3 space.
pabs3 5y ago
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.
- progbits 5y ago
  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 (GUI only tooling, binary blobs that don't work well with version control, weird custom subset of VB for the computer UI scripting, ...) that made me wish for some interface like PLC4X so I could just bypass all of it.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    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.
    - skadamat 5y ago
      I remember listening to a podcast with the Braintree founder and he had mentioned how they worked with the other payment providers out there to create some shared, common standards. This type of competition / co-opetition does happen from time to time (also see Lyft and Uber also co-lobbying governments together). No idea how this would work for this industry though
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > I'm probably missing something but why would the industry back this? One possible reason: to "commoditize your complement" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement). These industries make hardware, making the software side better makes that hardware more useful.
onion2k 5y ago
In case you're wondering what PLC4X is, it's a way of gluing different industrial IoC things together. https://plc4x.apache.org/ https://plc4x.apache.org/
kanwisher 5y ago
Glad he gave up. This is the kind of project industries should be funding. It seems like a bunch of factories got his labor for free. I love open source but its better if its something that scratches you own itch, or someone funds it.
- lstodd 5y ago
  Industry funded TR-069. It is a lovecraftian nightmare, not even open-source efforts could salvage anything useful. Another industry funded FIX. It is just a bit less of the same.
jsiepkes 5y ago
I truely feel for the guy. Reading the blog it seems like the age old story of having a superior product (drastically cut cost, better performance, etc.). However getting managers at customers to stick their neck out for it is hard. Because they know (and to a degree I can't say I blame them) changing such a critical piece of core infrastructure is going to be stressful. And what's in it for them if the company saves some money it is currently happy to spend? If it fails they sure do know what's in it for them... So big chance they'll just stick with the properietary solution they already have. EDIT: I should add I think there is also another dimension to this. Things that currently work and "only" cost money are a problem solved for a company. If they have to change it they have to spend their "intelectual budget" on it. Meaning resources like technical people which are probably already scarce and working on other project need to be assigned to it.
- ngc248 5y ago
  >>>> Things that currently work and "only" cost money are a problem solved for a company. If they have to change it they have to spend their "intelectual budget" on it. Meaning resources like technical people which are probably already scarce and working on other project need to be assigned to it. This is on the mark. This is why "upgrading" anything is hard. Stuff already implemented and being used has an inertia, which is very hard to overcome.
- ensignavenger 5y ago
  Proprietary solution never cost "only" money. You generally have to negotiate licensing, then you have to renegotiate licensing when you need to make a change (or when you current terms expire). You have to invest effort into understanding your license (Open Source licenses are usually at least somewhat standardized and usually a lot short than proprietary licenses). Finally, the big kicker is vendor lock-in. If the vendor doesn't want to or can't support you business anymore, you have no choice but to replace their software. If the vendor want to change their terms, you can't find some one else to support you. If a vendor changes the product, you can't fork it to continue using it the way you need to. I have never seen a proprietary software product that "only" cost money.
the-dude 5y ago
Maybe I missed something, but I had to search for the repo : https://github.com/apache/plc4x https://github.com/apache/plc4x
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Believe it, or not. We still failed at getting customers to go beyond our incredibly successful POCs. I’ll write a separate article on this. What we were told off the record was, in every case things didn’t proceed due to politics and not our performance. Sorry to hear it didn't work out, Chris - looking forward to your article. PLC4X was definitely one of the more interesting projects at codecentric.
charcircuit 5y ago
I thought this blog post ironic since it said stuff like "free trial of open source" and "Industry 4.0." I also think it's crazy that the government forces businesses to be profitable.
- ath0 5y ago
  In a sense, the US government does the same thing. In the US tax code, you can can deduct business expenses to reduce taxes — ie, subtract expenses for a corporation you control from your personal income. This has been known be abused, as folks deduct their personal car, house, travel… as a result, if you have a business that goes long enough without a profit, the IRS will look really hard at it to make sure it’s not really leisure. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irc183activitiesnotengagedinforprofit.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irc183activitiesnotengagedin...
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > if you have a business that goes long enough without a profit, the IRS will look really hard at it to make sure it’s not really leisure. Uber lost 20 billion dollars in the last decade. Where's IRS?
CaptainJustin 5y ago
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 this case. An ice-machine that has three size options and an on/off switch. The classic case of the bean-to-cup coffee machine. Does anyone know if there is a standard (for manufactures) for this sort of thing? If this was a standard that added a dollar or 3 to appliances one could plug-in some IOT board that allows for Home-assistant or similar integration. Of course I've completely ignored the question of whether or not a market exists.
- ZiiS 5y ago
  Adding physical connectors to mains voltage devices operated near water has significant costs. Wireless has managed to cater for this segment though still severely lacking standardization.
- wiseleo 5y ago
  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.
- DannyBee 5y ago
  The standard you probably want is IO-Link, or close to it. It was meant to bring a bit of smarts to the standard 3-wire sensors and basic actuation pins, with 100% backwards compatibility. So you have a standard analog temperature sensor that outputs 4-20ma on its pins. With IO-Link, it still does that, but if you hook it up to an io-link master, you can just read the temperature directly in C/F on the same pins. Or adjust the calibration. Or … It's not a perfect match, mind you, but i think it's pretty close.
- Maxious 5y ago
  There is a sort of this thing for demand response - ie. the electricity company urgently needs to reduce load and are willing to pay you for it. Of course, the appliance manufacturers have to provide a way for electricity companies that use different communication protocols to have this control. Enter AS/NZS 4755 which uses a RJ-45 connector - if you pull the DRM1 pin to ground, the device turns off.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
- smarx007 5y ago
  https://github.com/apache/plc4x/tree/develop/plc4c https://github.com/apache/plc4x/tree/develop/plc4c
  - jhgb 5y ago
    The main page does say "C (not ready for usage)", though.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  Sorry, I don't understand the implication here.
smarx007 5y ago
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 upstreamed. This way, the company pays money to solve their problem (and not competitors') and it's not seen as charity (it's consulting), while an OSS project goes on. Moreover, the OSS project is itself used as a selling point for the consulting services, as a proof that we will not lock the customer in with some proprietary framework.
- pfranz 5y ago
  As a peon, I push for open source because I'm tired of doing the same thing at multiple jobs that have nothing to do with our competitive advantage. That goes for a lot of industry collaboration. So much money is quietly wasted on labor that could be saved by standards and open source projects existing.
  - yohannparis 5y ago
    So true! I don't understand why the government does not provide grants to open source projects that help the most people. Things are changing (i.e. Sweden & France using Matrix), but I see some projects like public infrastructure (roads, sewage, power lines.) If they are good and strong enough, a business can piggyback on it and be more efficient.
    - voakbasda 5y ago
      Call me cynical, but I believe more government adoption of open source will occur only when those projects can match the political kickbacks being paid by the proprietary vendors. Corruption is globally endemic, and there is too much money sloshing around to keep politicians honest and working in the interests of The People they purportedly serve.
- pyb 5y ago
phoronixrly 5y ago
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...
- jcelerier 5y ago
  as usual when it's about free software licenses, https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright 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
- charcircuit 5y ago
  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.
  - glogla 5y ago
    Maybe. Or maybe you are just helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Whether proprietary software is a force for good or just another mechanism of exploitation is a matter of opinion, and the GP might not share yours.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      As a child starting from $0 I built up almost all of the money I have now doing contract work by making closed source software using open source software. Being able to quickly make things without even having to spend any money is great for someone with no money. It didn't make me poorer as someone with $0, it made me much richer. I know my software was a positive to the lives of many people even if it is closed source.
jarym 5y ago
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.
jpfr 5y ago
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 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.
- p_l 5y ago
  First, a bit of off-topic, but do you know we keep #open62541 open for you on Libera.Chat? :D I think the biggest issue I encountered with OPC-UA is the rather random nature of implementations from vendors. For example, I had S7-1500 PLC deployed on a project, and we used OPC-UA to talk to it as well as to expose internals of the program that was talking to it. We also had WinCC HMI, and while it could do basic read-write access to OPC-UA, we couldn't attempt to go for Method Calls, which would have considerably simplified a bunch of things for us. Meanwhile, FreeOPC-UA (python) turned out to be a bit buggy ;) It's a quite nice system, and I really like the object-oriented nature of it and support for modeling instead of random soup of PLC tags that appears to be the norm. Standard industry models for various components help extra there. Currently I'm looking into implementing a wrapper around open62541 for Common Lisp and Ada, and possibly a CORBA & DDS translator for it. Originally I missed PLC4X completely, and we needed to talk to S7-1500 as soon as possible and kinda got stuck with Python, now I wish I could do it in Lisp or Ada and get it done probably much faster :)
  - jpfr 5y ago
    > First, a bit of off-topic, but do you know we keep #open62541 open for you on Libera.Chat? :D Ahh, that's you! I came in to say hi on the channel whn you announced. But the channel was rather unresponsive. Will do that again with a bouncer to keep the connection open over night. Ada and Lisp are both really nice languages. Much success with that!
qwertox 5y ago
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.
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  Taxes. You invented taxes.
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
    Government grants for open source software would probably be a good thing though, now that this is mentioned. Just like the arts get public funding due to public good, open source software would make sense as well. Even better than most of these things, because by definition, open source is free for the public, whereas grants for arts and even things like research are often locked behind a paywall of sorts.
    - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
      The EU already does this. I'm sympathetic, but once you have witnessed how their research grants program works, or what the results are when bureaucrats fund "art", you might not be as excited. These things have a way of becoming something different than what was originally envisioned.
  - qwertox 5y ago
    At least in Germany taxes aren't bound to a specific purpose, they're not allowed to be. They get thrown into a big pot and then distributed as needed. Then you'd have these OSS developers (whoever represents them) fighting against other recipients. It would be better to have the FAANGs of the world being forced to pay into a bucket which gets distributed specifically to OSS projects.
_zooted 5y ago
I'm assuming [1] didn't work very well then: [1]: https://plc4x.apache.org/users/commercial-support.html https://plc4x.apache.org/users/commercial-support.html
collaborative 5y ago
The sad consequence of OSS is that the cost of software is fast approaching $0. Only SaaS barely manages to turn in a profit these days and I think that's simply because server-side is the only software still seen as costly. And even then, a common response from customers will be "why do I need to register". People are happy to marry a giant and sign up with Apple/Google/etc. Everyone else is expected to give their work for free and even support it. The world would be a better place if devs collectively stopped this
- cesarb 5y ago
  > The sad consequence of OSS is that the value of software is fast approaching $0. You are confusing cost and value. The cost of software might approach 0, but the value of software depends only on how useful it is to its users. One could even argue that a consequence of OSS is increasing the value of software in general, due to an ever growing collection of easily-obtainable useful software.
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Yes, you are correct. I meant cost, of course (edited)
DannyBee 5y ago
I have mixed feeling - almost all vendor-specific stuff in this space is a mess. Definitely "yesterday's technology, tomorrow", done in a way that is often very hard to use. This is a space that mainly wants stuff that has worked and will work for 20-30 years. Monitoring/etc is often still an optional feature.
pjc50 5y ago
An important Open Source lesson: it isn't really a business model in and of itself. It's worth it if you're scratching your own itch: running it on hardware that you have anyway, to do things that you want done. Doing it purely for others is not sustainable.
otrahuevada 5y ago
A good compromise for this kinds of things is usually dual licensing: - If you're big enough to make real money and you need my attention then pay me this much please - If you're some rando with a toy project, then we have a github issue tracker A project this size and age should always have a lawyer at hand just in case, and they should be able to walk the maintainers through the process of dual-licensing everything.
- jgilias 5y ago
  What you suggest is not really dual licensing though. It's a source-available license with a free tier. Dual licensing means that there are two licenses that the user can choose from at their discretion. This is why GPL may work together with a commercial license but not MIT, as businesses have reasons to avoid GPL.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - riveducha 5y ago
    It sounds like otrahuevada is describing the same thing, doesnt it? Choose a commercial license if you want support, or the open source license if you don’t. That is how I understood it.
    - jgilias 5y ago
      What otrahuevada is describing is a situation in which the software developer determines under what terms a particular user may use the software, not a situation where the user makes this choice. Only the latter situation is (can be) dual licensing. The difference may seem subtle, but it's actually huge. There was a discussion about this with someone else just yesterday. I'll find the link. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586
  - adament 5y ago
    I understood the parent post to suggest dual licensing where the commercial license also gives you paid support. I.e. if you expect support pay up by buying a commercial license. Though I see no reason to conflate the two things. I would suggest in this case not even having a public issue tracker, and make your open source offering a take it or leave it proposition.
cbm-vic-20 5y ago
"Like with typical Machine-Learning and AI projects, the job of the data-engineer is the least fun part and everyone wants to be a data-scientist, that works with a magically curated data-lake. This is the same with industrial data-integration. Most focus goes onto the projects that allow you to do great things with industrial data, however almost nobody is willing to work on the part of actually getting the data." To me, this seems like the inconvenient truth of this latest ML wave. There's lots of activity around using various ML libraies and tools, but they all assume you have input in the right format, that someone is collecting the data you need in the first place, etc.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Just like how everybody wants to be a game designer, so they can dictate to the engineers and artists how to implement all their glorious intricate designs they dreamed up while lounging in their leather armchair, without getting their own hands dirty doing any dull repetitive shit work in Unity3D or Photoshop, then complain bitterly when their minions didn't implement their vision properly to their exacting standards. Real jobs like that simply don't exist. Not that there aren't thousands of bootcamps and trade schools that will take your money to train you for imaginary low-effort high-prestige fantasy jobs that you'll never actually find.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    Knowing how to design a system is important even if you never get the chance to use that directly. Indirectly, it is useful when you need to call out a manager or colleague on their own bad designs.
ilaksh 5y ago
This is not really as much about open source as it is a larger issue: people are sheep. That includes developers and especially managers and executives. Few people are capable or willing to make decisions based on technical merit. They generally follow trends mindlessly or make decisions about tools based on political expediency or following whatever their local hers leader is doing. This has caused me quite a lot of frustration over the years because I like to make tools and solve problems. But often building a tool or coming up with a framework for solving a problem, even if it's technically really challenging, is only a fraction of the battle. It's getting any of the sheep to pay attention, notice, or decide your solution can benefit them in their sheep power struggles that is actually the biggest challenge.
wiremine 5y ago
> On the one side there’s no point in convincing the IT folks that what you’ve got to offer is awesome, if the OT folks don’t know about it. The OT folks are the ones doing the decisions. Everything in the OT world is pay-to-play. You’ll never get an article posted in an OT magazine, if you don’t pay for it. In the OT world there are also almost no conferences, like in the IT world. Everything is about industrial fairs with extremely expensive booths. The budgets the big players have at their disposal are simply unbelievable. As an open-source project you have no chance of being noticed at all. This is a key lesson. Open Source has not won in this part of the technology world, and it's a HUGE walled garden.
daudmalik06 5y ago
Guys this is just beggining, I am working in cyber security since 2013, After the discovery of log4shell, almost whole internet is at risk of supply-chain attacks, Hackers are continuously targeting open-source packages because it's really easy way to hack big organization. We literally track 100's of attack on daily basis. Services like vulert.com can play a vital role, let me know what do you think. Best
phkahler 5y ago
This strikes me weird. This software seems to be under the "Apache" umbrella. But this guys last plea for support is on his own blog. Beyond the "how do we fund open source" thing in the piece, I'm left with too many "what's going on" questions around this. Does Apache support it? Why or why not? Getting back to the blog, he says the comms piece is his unique selling point. OK, so people don't want to support the open part but yet it's missing a rather important piece. Is that correct? The whole thing just left me a bit confused.
- kevindong 5y ago
  > Note that the ASF does not pay for software development on any Apache projects; we rely on volunteers for all of our project coding work. The ASF focuses on providing the technical, legal, and community infrastructure for like-minded communities; we trust that healthy project communities will build their own software products. https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/ https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/
- chrisdutz 5y ago
  If you read my article carefully: I started the first steps on this 10 years ago ... then I was trying to build something proprietary, but gave up on it as it was an insane amount of work for one person financing himself. After that I started really getting involved with Apache and all sorts of projects. 5 years after my first attempt I started a new attempt, this time open-source and that worked from a project perspective. I wrote it in my own blog, because I am stopping free commmunity support for myself. It's not the project stoping this. Apache is a non-profit charity and it's dangerous for it to be accused of having monetary interests in what it does. In order to separate what I had to say from the project I published it on my blog and not even on the mailinglist (I sent a link though explaining why I'll be less active). Hope that explains things. The title of this thread however was a bit mis-leading.
rob_c 5y ago
open source is a great code license scheme, but a horrible business model. Shame it's not worked out for him, but when it's voluntary most businesses hear "free tool"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fefe23 5y ago
If you don't want people to rip you off without giving back, then use GPL and not Apache license. People in favor of the Apache license are people who like to "pay you in exposure". Turns out you can't eat exposure. Well you wrote that code, you want people to use it, right? Then attach no strings! Turns out I also need to pay rent and and buy food.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> In Germany a company needs to be profitable. If you run your business at a deficit for too long, you get your business closed, and then you usually even have to pay back a lot of taxes. What is this about? The government forcibly closes companies that lose money?
- wutangflange 5y ago
  This applies in America as well, at least for the IRS. One can only run a money-losing business for a few years before they stop considering you a business and instead a hobbyist.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Is this only applicable to small businesses? As Uber certainly isn't considered a hobby.
    - prirun 5y ago
      I think part of the equation is whether you are earning and spending money designed to eventually make money (supposedly), or whether you have a consulting business with nearly zero revenue and (say) $5000/year in expenses, ie, you have a fake consulting company with one employee, yourself, so you can deduct your hobby expenses. If you have 10 people working for you, customers paying you every month, a loan for a building or equipment, etc., my guess is that the IRS will let your business run at a loss much longer.
- vasili111 5y ago
  I think (but I maybe wrong) it is a "protection" against selling product under it's price.
- matwood 5y ago
  The IRS has something similar, hobby vs business, though doesn't seem to be as aggressive. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-side-income-is-it-a-hobby-or-a-business https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-side-income-is-it-a-hob...
Elegant-Ad2200 5y ago
I think this developer fails to address a major concern - companies looking for industrial control software want support. From the page, it looks like your support options are two guys, one in Germany and one in Poland. That would be an immediate non-starter for our company. The alternative would be to hire one or two developers on our own for support, and then the cost savings would be out the door. Maybe this library is more performant, but it's a (relatively) small piece of the industrial control scheme. A massive shift like this is just not something companies will take a risk on.
chrisdutz 5y ago
Hi all, geee ... a friend pointed me here and I have to admit that I'm quite overwhelmed by the wave my post generated. But very happy it seeded some good discussions. However I should point out that only I said that I would stop providing free community support. I am only one of the contributors. Even if I am probalby one of the most active ones, there are still others probably going to step up and tackle the one or the other issue someone might come up with. If the project was just me, Apache would probably have already moved the project into the atic, which is far from happening :-) Now I'll continue reading all of this ... but I had to set this straight first. Chris
- jamesrr39 5y ago
  Just curious (not in the industry), and I guess you maybe have already looked into this, but in addition to paid support have you considered paid work for implementing a specific new feature that a company wanted? A previous company I worked for did this for custom requests and made some money out of it.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    No one wants to pay for that either. https://c-ware.de/en/cf-listing-page/ https://c-ware.de/en/cf-listing-page/
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      What is up with those fundraising goals? Due to weird scaling, the number of 0s in the goal overflow onto each other, but it looks like you’re asking for hundreds of thousands or millions of euros to port things. Maybe that’s a reasonable sum for the work entailed, but I can’t recall ever seeing numbers that high for any kind of crowdfunded projects or open source support. Is asking for that kind of money realistic?
      - SirSourdough 5y ago
        I think most of them are in the the €5,000-20,000 range and there’s an issue with rendering the numbers that is duplicating the decimal value after the comma. Seems in line with other projects / compensation sources on the face of things.
chaostheory 5y ago
… and this what reasonable people expect when maintainers walk away from a project, instead of purposely breaking other people’s stuff.
brianm 5y ago
The title is misleading -- one developer (a major one, mind you) is stepping back from offering free community support. This is not "Apache PLC4X" announcing an end of community support, it is one of the core developers announcing he will be doing so.
- capableweb 5y ago
  To be fair, it seems there is just about ~5 developers who have contributed more than 100 commits(https://github.com/apache/plc4x/graphs/contributors https://github.com/apache/plc4x/graphs/contributors), with only three of them working on it for longer than one year. So it seems Christofer is just about the "core development team". Looking around at the website and the GitHub repository, I can't find a single place to get community support either, it seems to only be commercial support now, so it seems Apache PLC4X is indeed no longer offering community support.
forty 5y ago
I think building the stuff YOU (or your company) need for free, and offering paid support to build stuff other need is exactly how open source should work. If no one has interest in paying the paid support, I guess there is no business opportunity, and it's better to focus on something else.
natch 5y ago
If I am ever rich enough to engage in philanthropy for open source projects, I’ll let an admittedly petty pet peeve drive some of my decisions about which projects to shower cash onto: If you define your acronyms and tell me up front what tf your project does without making me google it, I’ll support you.
jmnicolas 5y ago
It's not surprising that people and especially companies are not going out of their way to pay for a free product. Instead of being hurt by how ungrateful the world is, maybe it would be better to find a way to make the rich pay and let the poor (like me) still get the software for free. It's not like it's unheard of in the open source world.
raxxorrax 5y ago
While I don't personally interface many PLC, I believe many could use this if the knew about it. Sounds like an awesome project.
kats 5y ago
The branding of the PLC4X project really doesn't match others in the industry. Maybe update the website to look similar to the big companies.

290 points by schlotzisk 5y ago

Too bad. There's not too many PLC projects out there. There's Inxton, TcOpen and few guys doing it in Beckhoff TwinCAT3 space.

pabs3 5y ago

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.

progbits 5y ago
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 (GUI only tooling, binary blobs that don't work well with version control, weird custom subset of VB for the computer UI scripting, ...) that made me wish for some interface like PLC4X so I could just bypass all of it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  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.
  - skadamat 5y ago
    I remember listening to a podcast with the Braintree founder and he had mentioned how they worked with the other payment providers out there to create some shared, common standards. This type of competition / co-opetition does happen from time to time (also see Lyft and Uber also co-lobbying governments together). No idea how this would work for this industry though
- cesarb 5y ago
  > I'm probably missing something but why would the industry back this? One possible reason: to "commoditize your complement" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement). These industries make hardware, making the software side better makes that hardware more useful.

onion2k 5y ago

In case you're wondering what PLC4X is, it's a way of gluing different industrial IoC things together. https://plc4x.apache.org/ https://plc4x.apache.org/

kanwisher 5y ago

Glad he gave up. This is the kind of project industries should be funding. It seems like a bunch of factories got his labor for free. I love open source but its better if its something that scratches you own itch, or someone funds it.

lstodd 5y ago
Industry funded TR-069. It is a lovecraftian nightmare, not even open-source efforts could salvage anything useful. Another industry funded FIX. It is just a bit less of the same.

jsiepkes 5y ago

I truely feel for the guy. Reading the blog it seems like the age old story of having a superior product (drastically cut cost, better performance, etc.). However getting managers at customers to stick their neck out for it is hard. Because they know (and to a degree I can't say I blame them) changing such a critical piece of core infrastructure is going to be stressful. And what's in it for them if the company saves some money it is currently happy to spend? If it fails they sure do know what's in it for them... So big chance they'll just stick with the properietary solution they already have. EDIT: I should add I think there is also another dimension to this. Things that currently work and "only" cost money are a problem solved for a company. If they have to change it they have to spend their "intelectual budget" on it. Meaning resources like technical people which are probably already scarce and working on other project need to be assigned to it.

ngc248 5y ago
>>>> Things that currently work and "only" cost money are a problem solved for a company. If they have to change it they have to spend their "intelectual budget" on it. Meaning resources like technical people which are probably already scarce and working on other project need to be assigned to it. This is on the mark. This is why "upgrading" anything is hard. Stuff already implemented and being used has an inertia, which is very hard to overcome.
ensignavenger 5y ago
Proprietary solution never cost "only" money. You generally have to negotiate licensing, then you have to renegotiate licensing when you need to make a change (or when you current terms expire). You have to invest effort into understanding your license (Open Source licenses are usually at least somewhat standardized and usually a lot short than proprietary licenses). Finally, the big kicker is vendor lock-in. If the vendor doesn't want to or can't support you business anymore, you have no choice but to replace their software. If the vendor want to change their terms, you can't find some one else to support you. If a vendor changes the product, you can't fork it to continue using it the way you need to. I have never seen a proprietary software product that "only" cost money.

the-dude 5y ago

Maybe I missed something, but I had to search for the repo : https://github.com/apache/plc4x https://github.com/apache/plc4x

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

Believe it, or not. We still failed at getting customers to go beyond our incredibly successful POCs. I’ll write a separate article on this. What we were told off the record was, in every case things didn’t proceed due to politics and not our performance. Sorry to hear it didn't work out, Chris - looking forward to your article. PLC4X was definitely one of the more interesting projects at codecentric.

charcircuit 5y ago

I thought this blog post ironic since it said stuff like "free trial of open source" and "Industry 4.0." I also think it's crazy that the government forces businesses to be profitable.

ath0 5y ago
In a sense, the US government does the same thing. In the US tax code, you can can deduct business expenses to reduce taxes — ie, subtract expenses for a corporation you control from your personal income. This has been known be abused, as folks deduct their personal car, house, travel… as a result, if you have a business that goes long enough without a profit, the IRS will look really hard at it to make sure it’s not really leisure. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irc183activitiesnotengagedinforprofit.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irc183activitiesnotengagedin...
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > if you have a business that goes long enough without a profit, the IRS will look really hard at it to make sure it’s not really leisure. Uber lost 20 billion dollars in the last decade. Where's IRS?

CaptainJustin 5y ago

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 this case. An ice-machine that has three size options and an on/off switch. The classic case of the bean-to-cup coffee machine. Does anyone know if there is a standard (for manufactures) for this sort of thing? If this was a standard that added a dollar or 3 to appliances one could plug-in some IOT board that allows for Home-assistant or similar integration. Of course I've completely ignored the question of whether or not a market exists.

ZiiS 5y ago
Adding physical connectors to mains voltage devices operated near water has significant costs. Wireless has managed to cater for this segment though still severely lacking standardization.
wiseleo 5y ago
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.
DannyBee 5y ago
The standard you probably want is IO-Link, or close to it. It was meant to bring a bit of smarts to the standard 3-wire sensors and basic actuation pins, with 100% backwards compatibility. So you have a standard analog temperature sensor that outputs 4-20ma on its pins. With IO-Link, it still does that, but if you hook it up to an io-link master, you can just read the temperature directly in C/F on the same pins. Or adjust the calibration. Or … It's not a perfect match, mind you, but i think it's pretty close.
Maxious 5y ago
There is a sort of this thing for demand response - ie. the electricity company urgently needs to reduce load and are willing to pay you for it. Of course, the appliance manufacturers have to provide a way for electricity companies that use different communication protocols to have this control. Enter AS/NZS 4755 which uses a RJ-45 connector - if you pull the DRM1 pin to ground, the device turns off.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

smarx007 5y ago
https://github.com/apache/plc4x/tree/develop/plc4c https://github.com/apache/plc4x/tree/develop/plc4c
- jhgb 5y ago
  The main page does say "C (not ready for usage)", though.
Redoubts 5y ago
Sorry, I don't understand the implication here.

smarx007 5y ago

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 upstreamed. This way, the company pays money to solve their problem (and not competitors') and it's not seen as charity (it's consulting), while an OSS project goes on. Moreover, the OSS project is itself used as a selling point for the consulting services, as a proof that we will not lock the customer in with some proprietary framework.

pfranz 5y ago
As a peon, I push for open source because I'm tired of doing the same thing at multiple jobs that have nothing to do with our competitive advantage. That goes for a lot of industry collaboration. So much money is quietly wasted on labor that could be saved by standards and open source projects existing.
- yohannparis 5y ago
  So true! I don't understand why the government does not provide grants to open source projects that help the most people. Things are changing (i.e. Sweden & France using Matrix), but I see some projects like public infrastructure (roads, sewage, power lines.) If they are good and strong enough, a business can piggyback on it and be more efficient.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    Call me cynical, but I believe more government adoption of open source will occur only when those projects can match the political kickbacks being paid by the proprietary vendors. Corruption is globally endemic, and there is too much money sloshing around to keep politicians honest and working in the interests of The People they purportedly serve.
pyb 5y ago

phoronixrly 5y ago

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...

jcelerier 5y ago
as usual when it's about free software licenses, https://www.reddit.com/r/stallmanwasright 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
charcircuit 5y ago
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.
- glogla 5y ago
  Maybe. Or maybe you are just helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Whether proprietary software is a force for good or just another mechanism of exploitation is a matter of opinion, and the GP might not share yours.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    As a child starting from $0 I built up almost all of the money I have now doing contract work by making closed source software using open source software. Being able to quickly make things without even having to spend any money is great for someone with no money. It didn't make me poorer as someone with $0, it made me much richer. I know my software was a positive to the lives of many people even if it is closed source.

jarym 5y ago

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.

jpfr 5y ago

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 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.

p_l 5y ago
First, a bit of off-topic, but do you know we keep #open62541 open for you on Libera.Chat? :D I think the biggest issue I encountered with OPC-UA is the rather random nature of implementations from vendors. For example, I had S7-1500 PLC deployed on a project, and we used OPC-UA to talk to it as well as to expose internals of the program that was talking to it. We also had WinCC HMI, and while it could do basic read-write access to OPC-UA, we couldn't attempt to go for Method Calls, which would have considerably simplified a bunch of things for us. Meanwhile, FreeOPC-UA (python) turned out to be a bit buggy ;) It's a quite nice system, and I really like the object-oriented nature of it and support for modeling instead of random soup of PLC tags that appears to be the norm. Standard industry models for various components help extra there. Currently I'm looking into implementing a wrapper around open62541 for Common Lisp and Ada, and possibly a CORBA & DDS translator for it. Originally I missed PLC4X completely, and we needed to talk to S7-1500 as soon as possible and kinda got stuck with Python, now I wish I could do it in Lisp or Ada and get it done probably much faster :)
- jpfr 5y ago
  > First, a bit of off-topic, but do you know we keep #open62541 open for you on Libera.Chat? :D Ahh, that's you! I came in to say hi on the channel whn you announced. But the channel was rather unresponsive. Will do that again with a bouncer to keep the connection open over night. Ada and Lisp are both really nice languages. Much success with that!

qwertox 5y ago

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.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Taxes. You invented taxes.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  Government grants for open source software would probably be a good thing though, now that this is mentioned. Just like the arts get public funding due to public good, open source software would make sense as well. Even better than most of these things, because by definition, open source is free for the public, whereas grants for arts and even things like research are often locked behind a paywall of sorts.
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    The EU already does this. I'm sympathetic, but once you have witnessed how their research grants program works, or what the results are when bureaucrats fund "art", you might not be as excited. These things have a way of becoming something different than what was originally envisioned.
- qwertox 5y ago
  At least in Germany taxes aren't bound to a specific purpose, they're not allowed to be. They get thrown into a big pot and then distributed as needed. Then you'd have these OSS developers (whoever represents them) fighting against other recipients. It would be better to have the FAANGs of the world being forced to pay into a bucket which gets distributed specifically to OSS projects.

_zooted 5y ago

I'm assuming [1] didn't work very well then: [1]: https://plc4x.apache.org/users/commercial-support.html https://plc4x.apache.org/users/commercial-support.html

collaborative 5y ago

The sad consequence of OSS is that the cost of software is fast approaching $0. Only SaaS barely manages to turn in a profit these days and I think that's simply because server-side is the only software still seen as costly. And even then, a common response from customers will be "why do I need to register". People are happy to marry a giant and sign up with Apple/Google/etc. Everyone else is expected to give their work for free and even support it. The world would be a better place if devs collectively stopped this

cesarb 5y ago
> The sad consequence of OSS is that the value of software is fast approaching $0. You are confusing cost and value. The cost of software might approach 0, but the value of software depends only on how useful it is to its users. One could even argue that a consequence of OSS is increasing the value of software in general, due to an ever growing collection of easily-obtainable useful software.
- collaborative 5y ago
  Yes, you are correct. I meant cost, of course (edited)

DannyBee 5y ago

I have mixed feeling - almost all vendor-specific stuff in this space is a mess. Definitely "yesterday's technology, tomorrow", done in a way that is often very hard to use. This is a space that mainly wants stuff that has worked and will work for 20-30 years. Monitoring/etc is often still an optional feature.

pjc50 5y ago

An important Open Source lesson: it isn't really a business model in and of itself. It's worth it if you're scratching your own itch: running it on hardware that you have anyway, to do things that you want done. Doing it purely for others is not sustainable.

otrahuevada 5y ago

A good compromise for this kinds of things is usually dual licensing: - If you're big enough to make real money and you need my attention then pay me this much please - If you're some rando with a toy project, then we have a github issue tracker A project this size and age should always have a lawyer at hand just in case, and they should be able to walk the maintainers through the process of dual-licensing everything.

jgilias 5y ago
What you suggest is not really dual licensing though. It's a source-available license with a free tier. Dual licensing means that there are two licenses that the user can choose from at their discretion. This is why GPL may work together with a commercial license but not MIT, as businesses have reasons to avoid GPL.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- riveducha 5y ago
  It sounds like otrahuevada is describing the same thing, doesnt it? Choose a commercial license if you want support, or the open source license if you don’t. That is how I understood it.
  - jgilias 5y ago
    What otrahuevada is describing is a situation in which the software developer determines under what terms a particular user may use the software, not a situation where the user makes this choice. Only the latter situation is (can be) dual licensing. The difference may seem subtle, but it's actually huge. There was a discussion about this with someone else just yesterday. I'll find the link. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871302#29873586
- adament 5y ago
  I understood the parent post to suggest dual licensing where the commercial license also gives you paid support. I.e. if you expect support pay up by buying a commercial license. Though I see no reason to conflate the two things. I would suggest in this case not even having a public issue tracker, and make your open source offering a take it or leave it proposition.

cbm-vic-20 5y ago

"Like with typical Machine-Learning and AI projects, the job of the data-engineer is the least fun part and everyone wants to be a data-scientist, that works with a magically curated data-lake. This is the same with industrial data-integration. Most focus goes onto the projects that allow you to do great things with industrial data, however almost nobody is willing to work on the part of actually getting the data." To me, this seems like the inconvenient truth of this latest ML wave. There's lots of activity around using various ML libraies and tools, but they all assume you have input in the right format, that someone is collecting the data you need in the first place, etc.

DonHopkins 5y ago
Just like how everybody wants to be a game designer, so they can dictate to the engineers and artists how to implement all their glorious intricate designs they dreamed up while lounging in their leather armchair, without getting their own hands dirty doing any dull repetitive shit work in Unity3D or Photoshop, then complain bitterly when their minions didn't implement their vision properly to their exacting standards. Real jobs like that simply don't exist. Not that there aren't thousands of bootcamps and trade schools that will take your money to train you for imaginary low-effort high-prestige fantasy jobs that you'll never actually find.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  Knowing how to design a system is important even if you never get the chance to use that directly. Indirectly, it is useful when you need to call out a manager or colleague on their own bad designs.

ilaksh 5y ago

This is not really as much about open source as it is a larger issue: people are sheep. That includes developers and especially managers and executives. Few people are capable or willing to make decisions based on technical merit. They generally follow trends mindlessly or make decisions about tools based on political expediency or following whatever their local hers leader is doing. This has caused me quite a lot of frustration over the years because I like to make tools and solve problems. But often building a tool or coming up with a framework for solving a problem, even if it's technically really challenging, is only a fraction of the battle. It's getting any of the sheep to pay attention, notice, or decide your solution can benefit them in their sheep power struggles that is actually the biggest challenge.

wiremine 5y ago

> On the one side there’s no point in convincing the IT folks that what you’ve got to offer is awesome, if the OT folks don’t know about it. The OT folks are the ones doing the decisions. Everything in the OT world is pay-to-play. You’ll never get an article posted in an OT magazine, if you don’t pay for it. In the OT world there are also almost no conferences, like in the IT world. Everything is about industrial fairs with extremely expensive booths. The budgets the big players have at their disposal are simply unbelievable. As an open-source project you have no chance of being noticed at all. This is a key lesson. Open Source has not won in this part of the technology world, and it's a HUGE walled garden.

daudmalik06 5y ago

Guys this is just beggining, I am working in cyber security since 2013, After the discovery of log4shell, almost whole internet is at risk of supply-chain attacks, Hackers are continuously targeting open-source packages because it's really easy way to hack big organization. We literally track 100's of attack on daily basis. Services like vulert.com can play a vital role, let me know what do you think. Best

phkahler 5y ago

This strikes me weird. This software seems to be under the "Apache" umbrella. But this guys last plea for support is on his own blog. Beyond the "how do we fund open source" thing in the piece, I'm left with too many "what's going on" questions around this. Does Apache support it? Why or why not? Getting back to the blog, he says the comms piece is his unique selling point. OK, so people don't want to support the open part but yet it's missing a rather important piece. Is that correct? The whole thing just left me a bit confused.

kevindong 5y ago
> Note that the ASF does not pay for software development on any Apache projects; we rely on volunteers for all of our project coding work. The ASF focuses on providing the technical, legal, and community infrastructure for like-minded communities; we trust that healthy project communities will build their own software products. https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/ https://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/
chrisdutz 5y ago
If you read my article carefully: I started the first steps on this 10 years ago ... then I was trying to build something proprietary, but gave up on it as it was an insane amount of work for one person financing himself. After that I started really getting involved with Apache and all sorts of projects. 5 years after my first attempt I started a new attempt, this time open-source and that worked from a project perspective. I wrote it in my own blog, because I am stopping free commmunity support for myself. It's not the project stoping this. Apache is a non-profit charity and it's dangerous for it to be accused of having monetary interests in what it does. In order to separate what I had to say from the project I published it on my blog and not even on the mailinglist (I sent a link though explaining why I'll be less active). Hope that explains things. The title of this thread however was a bit mis-leading.

rob_c 5y ago

open source is a great code license scheme, but a horrible business model. Shame it's not worked out for him, but when it's voluntary most businesses hear "free tool"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fefe23 5y ago

If you don't want people to rip you off without giving back, then use GPL and not Apache license. People in favor of the Apache license are people who like to "pay you in exposure". Turns out you can't eat exposure. Well you wrote that code, you want people to use it, right? Then attach no strings! Turns out I also need to pay rent and and buy food.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> In Germany a company needs to be profitable. If you run your business at a deficit for too long, you get your business closed, and then you usually even have to pay back a lot of taxes. What is this about? The government forcibly closes companies that lose money?

wutangflange 5y ago
This applies in America as well, at least for the IRS. One can only run a money-losing business for a few years before they stop considering you a business and instead a hobbyist.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Is this only applicable to small businesses? As Uber certainly isn't considered a hobby.
  - prirun 5y ago
    I think part of the equation is whether you are earning and spending money designed to eventually make money (supposedly), or whether you have a consulting business with nearly zero revenue and (say) $5000/year in expenses, ie, you have a fake consulting company with one employee, yourself, so you can deduct your hobby expenses. If you have 10 people working for you, customers paying you every month, a loan for a building or equipment, etc., my guess is that the IRS will let your business run at a loss much longer.
vasili111 5y ago
I think (but I maybe wrong) it is a "protection" against selling product under it's price.
matwood 5y ago
The IRS has something similar, hobby vs business, though doesn't seem to be as aggressive. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-side-income-is-it-a-hobby-or-a-business https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/earning-side-income-is-it-a-hob...

Elegant-Ad2200 5y ago

I think this developer fails to address a major concern - companies looking for industrial control software want support. From the page, it looks like your support options are two guys, one in Germany and one in Poland. That would be an immediate non-starter for our company. The alternative would be to hire one or two developers on our own for support, and then the cost savings would be out the door. Maybe this library is more performant, but it's a (relatively) small piece of the industrial control scheme. A massive shift like this is just not something companies will take a risk on.

chrisdutz 5y ago

Hi all, geee ... a friend pointed me here and I have to admit that I'm quite overwhelmed by the wave my post generated. But very happy it seeded some good discussions. However I should point out that only I said that I would stop providing free community support. I am only one of the contributors. Even if I am probalby one of the most active ones, there are still others probably going to step up and tackle the one or the other issue someone might come up with. If the project was just me, Apache would probably have already moved the project into the atic, which is far from happening :-) Now I'll continue reading all of this ... but I had to set this straight first. Chris

jamesrr39 5y ago
Just curious (not in the industry), and I guess you maybe have already looked into this, but in addition to paid support have you considered paid work for implementing a specific new feature that a company wanted? A previous company I worked for did this for custom requests and made some money out of it.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  No one wants to pay for that either. https://c-ware.de/en/cf-listing-page/ https://c-ware.de/en/cf-listing-page/
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    What is up with those fundraising goals? Due to weird scaling, the number of 0s in the goal overflow onto each other, but it looks like you’re asking for hundreds of thousands or millions of euros to port things. Maybe that’s a reasonable sum for the work entailed, but I can’t recall ever seeing numbers that high for any kind of crowdfunded projects or open source support. Is asking for that kind of money realistic?
    - SirSourdough 5y ago
      I think most of them are in the the €5,000-20,000 range and there’s an issue with rendering the numbers that is duplicating the decimal value after the comma. Seems in line with other projects / compensation sources on the face of things.

chaostheory 5y ago

… and this what reasonable people expect when maintainers walk away from a project, instead of purposely breaking other people’s stuff.

brianm 5y ago

The title is misleading -- one developer (a major one, mind you) is stepping back from offering free community support. This is not "Apache PLC4X" announcing an end of community support, it is one of the core developers announcing he will be doing so.

capableweb 5y ago
To be fair, it seems there is just about ~5 developers who have contributed more than 100 commits(https://github.com/apache/plc4x/graphs/contributors https://github.com/apache/plc4x/graphs/contributors), with only three of them working on it for longer than one year. So it seems Christofer is just about the "core development team". Looking around at the website and the GitHub repository, I can't find a single place to get community support either, it seems to only be commercial support now, so it seems Apache PLC4X is indeed no longer offering community support.

forty 5y ago

I think building the stuff YOU (or your company) need for free, and offering paid support to build stuff other need is exactly how open source should work. If no one has interest in paying the paid support, I guess there is no business opportunity, and it's better to focus on something else.

natch 5y ago

If I am ever rich enough to engage in philanthropy for open source projects, I’ll let an admittedly petty pet peeve drive some of my decisions about which projects to shower cash onto: If you define your acronyms and tell me up front what tf your project does without making me google it, I’ll support you.

jmnicolas 5y ago

It's not surprising that people and especially companies are not going out of their way to pay for a free product. Instead of being hurt by how ungrateful the world is, maybe it would be better to find a way to make the rich pay and let the poor (like me) still get the software for free. It's not like it's unheard of in the open source world.

raxxorrax 5y ago

While I don't personally interface many PLC, I believe many could use this if the knew about it. Sounds like an awesome project.

kats 5y ago

The branding of the PLC4X project really doesn't match others in the industry. Maybe update the website to look similar to the big companies.