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For a brief period I worked at GE-IP. The reason I did not continue was, I felt I could add more value to the customer by using open source software and was not

For a brief period I worked at GE-IP. The reason I did not continue was, I felt I could add more value to the customer by using open source software and was not allowed to use it. I was working in the mining industry. Where deep vendor lock-in is seen as the only path to success. GE follows this model to the core. Before a major revolution there needs to be more open source industrial software.

tfigment 12y ago
I work in an industrial space similar to GEs space and we generate high volumes of data from our machines in a distributed network. The data is really valuable in operating and optimizing our systems as well as doing reliability analysis. Somehow we convinced our customers to pay for a separate network connection as part of the agreements and do the VPN security. We do not operate over the customer networks except in certain cases and then both sides are super paranoid and isolate each other as much as possible. We did a lot of the software in-house with open source except were we could not. Every once and a while we talk with GE-IP, OSI, Wonderware, and other large vendors in the space but talks always fall through in the end because its just really expensive. Even with steep discounts these vendors cost several millions of dollars over 3-5 years more than what we currently do for <$500K a year (most of that cost is the vendor software where open source is not available). Vendor lock-in is a terrible problem for us. I'm pretty sure we do not get the value we are paying for. In one case we are using an 8 year old version because the 3-4 versions released since had major compatibility or breaking changes that we found unacceptable and then they started putting in intrusive always-on DRM-like licensing and actually cause more downtime for us so we don't use it and I'm trying to find a practical way out. I want to use open-source and I would like my company to support putting our work back into open-source but I don't see it happening. There are way too many fears of loss of IP and effort to get lawyers involved to support it so it probably won't happen. I agree the industrial networking space is ready for disruption one of these days but its not exactly web pages that anyone can do out of school so it does not get open-sourced much but I think its coming soon enough.
- spitfire 12y ago
  What industry is this? There seems to be a lot of spaces where a few smart people could make a lot of difference. And it sure beats doing locsomobile amafacegoosoft. EDIT: I am genuinely asking about the industry because I want to find spaces to expand to.
  - tfigment 12y ago
    SCADA systems basically is the area you are interested in. Real-time industrial equipment monitoring (and control). Typically these are thick clients but people are clamoring for mobile and thin-client access to real-time data as well as historical time-series data. There are some very serious security threats in this space which is why the gorillas have leverage (not that they are really secure though). Time-series historians are expensive if you log a large amount of data. There are several attempts at this like OpenTSDB which is a historian on hbase and is where GE is trying to go. We looked at their offering briefly and its hard to say if hadoop is good enough for near real-time but it looks good for long-trend analysis I think.
    - spitfire 12y ago
      Ahh SCADA systems. Definitely something that should get some serious attention. I'm looking for legacy or underserved complete verticals I can bring some modern technology to. Right now, that's low finance.

tfigment 12y ago

I work in an industrial space similar to GEs space and we generate high volumes of data from our machines in a distributed network. The data is really valuable in operating and optimizing our systems as well as doing reliability analysis. Somehow we convinced our customers to pay for a separate network connection as part of the agreements and do the VPN security. We do not operate over the customer networks except in certain cases and then both sides are super paranoid and isolate each other as much as possible. We did a lot of the software in-house with open source except were we could not. Every once and a while we talk with GE-IP, OSI, Wonderware, and other large vendors in the space but talks always fall through in the end because its just really expensive. Even with steep discounts these vendors cost several millions of dollars over 3-5 years more than what we currently do for <$500K a year (most of that cost is the vendor software where open source is not available). Vendor lock-in is a terrible problem for us. I'm pretty sure we do not get the value we are paying for. In one case we are using an 8 year old version because the 3-4 versions released since had major compatibility or breaking changes that we found unacceptable and then they started putting in intrusive always-on DRM-like licensing and actually cause more downtime for us so we don't use it and I'm trying to find a practical way out. I want to use open-source and I would like my company to support putting our work back into open-source but I don't see it happening. There are way too many fears of loss of IP and effort to get lawyers involved to support it so it probably won't happen. I agree the industrial networking space is ready for disruption one of these days but its not exactly web pages that anyone can do out of school so it does not get open-sourced much but I think its coming soon enough.

spitfire 12y ago
What industry is this? There seems to be a lot of spaces where a few smart people could make a lot of difference. And it sure beats doing locsomobile amafacegoosoft. EDIT: I am genuinely asking about the industry because I want to find spaces to expand to.
- tfigment 12y ago
  SCADA systems basically is the area you are interested in. Real-time industrial equipment monitoring (and control). Typically these are thick clients but people are clamoring for mobile and thin-client access to real-time data as well as historical time-series data. There are some very serious security threats in this space which is why the gorillas have leverage (not that they are really secure though). Time-series historians are expensive if you log a large amount of data. There are several attempts at this like OpenTSDB which is a historian on hbase and is where GE is trying to go. We looked at their offering briefly and its hard to say if hadoop is good enough for near real-time but it looks good for long-trend analysis I think.
  - spitfire 12y ago
    Ahh SCADA systems. Definitely something that should get some serious attention. I'm looking for legacy or underserved complete verticals I can bring some modern technology to. Right now, that's low finance.