Christopher Dutz, creator and principal developer of the Apache PLC4X set of free libraries for industrial automation, who is the vice president of the Apache Software Foundation in charge of the Apache PLC4X project, issued an ultimatum to corporations, according to which he expressed his readiness to stop development if will not be able to solve problems with the financing of their work.
The dissatisfaction is caused by the fact that the use of Apache PLC4X instead of proprietary solutions allows corporations to save tens of millions of euros on the purchase of licenses, but in response, companies do not receive proper assistance for development, despite the fact that work on Apache PLC4X requires a lot of labor and financial investments in equipment and software.
Inspired by the fact that its development is used by the largest industrial enterprises, and a large number of requests and questions are received from them, in 2020 the author of PLC4X left his main job and devoted all his time to the development of PLC4X, intending to earn money by providing consulting services and finalizing functionality to order . But partly due to the downturn amid the COVID-19 pandemic, things didn't turn out as expected, and in order to stay afloat and avoid bankruptcy, they had to survive on grants and one-off commissioned works.
As a result, Christopher was tired of wasting his time without getting the proper return, and aware of the approach of emotional burnout, and he decided to stop providing free support to PLC4X users and will now provide advice, training and support only on a paid basis. In addition, from now on, he will develop for free only what is required for his work or is of interest for conducting experiments, and work on the functions or fixes necessary for users will be carried out only for a fee. For example, he will no longer develop drivers for new programming languages ββand create modules for integration for free.
To implement new features that are important for users, a model reminiscent of crowdfunding is proposed, according to which ideas to expand the capabilities of Apache PLC4X will be implemented only after a certain amount has been collected to finance development. For example, Christopher is ready to implement ideas for using PLC4X drivers in Rust, TypeScript, Python or C#/.NET programs after 20 thousand euros are raised.
If the proposed scheme does not allow to receive at least some financial support for the development, then Christopher decided to curtail his business and stop supporting the project from his side. Recall that Apache PLC4X provides a set of libraries for unified access from Java, Go and C programs to any type of industrial programmable logic controllers (PLC) and IoT devices. To process the received data, integration is provided with projects such as Apache Calcite, Apache Camel, Apache Edgent, Apache Kafka-Connect, Apache Karaf and Apache NiFi.
Source: opennet.ru