Doctors don’t want you knowing this ONE TRICK to reverse aging. Hint, it’s to stop chugging soda & downing fistfuls of sugar.
Similarly, Ignition lovers and monolithic SCADA cultists hate these facts about open source software.
Misconceptions
With open source software, the community can abandon the project! What then? Who will support our needs when the community disbands??!!
Bruh, do you think companies operate any differently? Public and private companies alike can and have gone out of business and/or sunset products/platforms at will all the time & will continue to do so. Companies are under no obligation to offer eternal support for a product/platform & to make matters even worse, they have no incentive or obligation to take customer feedback.
A company’s success is tied to how well it can shill products to shareholders & none of these products/services have to be in the best interest of the stakeholders. One need not look any further than the heap of confusion that is the Rockwell & Microsoft stacks all across the board. Furthermore, companies are under no obligation to allow users to access the software prior to purchasing. Rarely is there any ‘try before you buy’ period. It’s usually ‘buy & then fry with the poor business decisions we shilled you to make because we have 5 sales/marketing people for every 1 developer’.
Open source software, on the other hand, must absolutely have the best interests of the stakeholders at heart as ultimately their adoption 100% dictates the success of the project. The community is composed entirely of stakeholders that collectively do their best to come to consensus on what features they wish to see & which ones they wish to sunset.
Yes, it’s not perfect, nothing ever has been & never will be. But what is better is that this debate is held publicly & everyone gets an equal voice in the matter.
HOWEVER, the true advantage is that even after an open source software project & community disbands, anyone can still fork the project & rebuild the binaries to host the solution for themselves. Good luck trying to do this with proprietary commercial software, most of which is going exclusively towards a SaaS-only model, even requiring fat-client apps to connect remotely to a license server and even refusing to make license keys on physical removable media.
It’s giving ‘You’ll own nothing & be happy’ vibes.
Prepackaged software is better. It just works.
Bold move Cotton, let’s see how it plays out.
Clearly, none of you ever heard or used Wonderware, PI, anything by SAP, or a myriad of other products prepackaged with hardware. Useful features hidden under layers of screens & menu options. Useless features proudly displayed front & center. Inconsistent naming conventions of links, transactions not back-flushing correctly, nonsensical routings, and a static-only color scheme that are a clear assault to people with color blindness like myself. Because people with disabilities & good UI/UX practices be damned.
Ignition scripting, Desigo BMS, literally all of the Fiori environment, need I say more?
Companies care about their customers! How can we trust this open source stuff???!!!
Yeah, sure buddy. See Azure IoT Central sunsetting, with the silence broken exclusively thanks to the investigative journalism by end-users. Why do you think any company would ever have your best interests in mind when their success is NOT dependent on satisfying stakeholders? Do we need to revisit economics 101 again & explain the difference between shareholders vs stakeholders?
Plus, with free public collaborative platforms out there like GitHub, it’s incredibly easy to organize developers at scale & track all the work that they’ve done. This is literally a non-issue, so stop with the FUD.
As far as trust goes, you’re kidding right? Bro, transparency is literally priority #1 forever & always. You can literally see everything the project contributors have done & choose for yourself which updates & functions you want to implement or not. You have zero control over what changes are made, which functionality was prioritized on a roll-out, and what exactly is going on behind the scenes with the solution you’ve chosen to deploy.
And no, the law has absolutely NOT caught up with the times. Consumer rights regarding data privacy is an absolute joke. Companies and the government don’t care and have no incentives or punishments to care.
Open source can’t scale. They don’t have the manpower!
MQTT much? `Nuff said.
Plus, it’s a testament to how terribly designed commercial products are that you would need an entire army of staff to manage it at all times, regardless how complex your needs & business case are. Operations overhead is one thing, forcing customers to purchase services & licenses through channel providers & obfuscating tutorials/knowledge base content is another.
Plus, let’s not forget the reason why more people did not adopt broker technology is because MQTT was only made publicly accessible without any royalties or licensing fees for its use in the last 10 years. Let’s not pretend people did NOT want to use it because the technology sucked.
People just want to do their jobs.
This goes out to a special reviewer, which you can see referenced on my LinkedIn post.
Then why would you ever force anyone to succumb to poorly documented commercial software that you can’t even try before you buy & the knowledge base content is severely lacking and/or never gets updated when users ask a question?
I don’t even understand this one myself to be honest. Is the argument that publicly documented software with the entire world reviewing the quality of the content for accuracy a bad thing? And that proprietary commercial software is better documented all around, both for end-users and developers? Because if so, this is absolute clown behavior.
Sure, not every open source software project has the world’s best documentation but it’s the fact that anyone can use it & contribute to this documentation that offers validity that serves more than just social proof. It’s the fact that anyone in the world can see it & be held accountable for any false information, whereas only those small select few technical users of a commercial product can ever even begin to understand whether some documentation is inaccurate & even then, they don’t have the means to publicly share with everyone that an issue exists with the functionality as well as the documentation.
On top of that, the company is under no obligation to implement these changes, whereas with an open source project, anyone can spot the issue, raise awareness, propose a fix, and you can then choose whether you want to implement this fix & the way in which you implement it.
Don’t you want people to use self-help tools to solve their own problems? Isn’t self-reliance the dream of a digitally mature organization? And what if the best way they can help themselves is by deploying some open source software the tried-and-true way of command-line-interface to programmatically build what they envision?
Some food for thought.
As always everyone, you could’ve been doing anything else in the world but you instead chose to consider my work. And for that, I am forever grateful. I’ll see you in the next one.
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DISCLAIMER: I am not sponsored or influenced in any way, shape, or form by the companies and products mentioned. This is my own original content, with image credits given as appropriate and necessary.
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