Hobbyist Toolkit
LINX Toolkit Open-Sourced?
Hello everyone,
I wanted to share this for anyone that may be interested or that has a passion for open-source and LabVIEW.
For it to work they need people willing to help guide and manage the toolkits.
Check this link out for some initial details: LinkedIn post from Sergio Velderrain
Your question mark in the title kind of gives the wrong impression. It has been open sourced already for a long time:
https://github.com/LVMakerHub/LINX
That repository contains all the code including the backend source code for the shared library for the various targets. The initial commit dates back from Aug 10, 2013. I'm not sure if it was always public from the start but I know it was publically visible around 2019, just before NI released the Community Edition and decided to make this Toolkit part of it.
While Sam could probably provide a much more detailed view of the history, what I gathered so far is that it was initially some sort of internship project or similar at NI. At some point Sam transitioned to Digilent, a company that NI had fully acquired in 2013 but held some shares in before. MCC which had been acquired in 2005 was subsequently put under the Digilent umbrella. Sam and supposedly others were continuing on Linx while at Digilent but somewhere around 2016 this pretty much stopped until it was revived for inclusion into the LabVIEW Community Edition in 2019.
At least since that time it was fully open source on github but most likely it was before, I just didn't happen to hear about it.
What is proposed by Sergio, is not to open source the toolkit, which it already is, but to provide some resources from NI to actively maintain some sort of stewardship for the project as such. Right now it is just sitting there on Github and nobody is really doing much besides the occasional commit from some NI employee trying to keep it alive so it is not just a heavy log on the leg of the Community Edition.
I personally tried to clone it and make some substantial work on the backend shared library to make it more flexible for use across the different possible platforms, but it turned out to be a completely solitary experience and I eventually lost the drive for it.
NI can't and won't do all the work, so there will have to be some people interested to carry part of the work to go forward with this. But it needs some coordination by someone, and that is what I understand Sergio is proposing.
@rolfk wrote:NI can't and won't do all the work, so there will have to be some people interested to carry part of the work to go forward with this. But it needs some coordination by someone, and that is what I understand Sergio is proposing.
The actual plan is to mimic what we started doing with the Icon Editor. This will include a Steering Committee (SteerCo) which will include people from outside of NI to help direct the community what to work on. This is a joint venture: the community will have at least as much influence on the tool as NI.
If you are interested in committing some time (2 hours/week is what is currently being asked) to help set the the direction of the product, review pull requests, and generally maintain the repo, follow that link in the LinkedIn post and sign up. Based on what Sergio last posted, there are currently 5 people signed up to be on the Linx SteerCo. We were talking about limiting the size of a SteerCo, but I think it will likely depend on the size of the repo and the amount of activity it sees.
Addendum 1: You do not need to be on a SteerCo to contribute to a repo. The SteerCo are the product owners. They are not expected to do all of the work.
Addendum 2: There are 14 repos Sergio is actively trying to get set up following this model. Most of these are libraries that have been out there and/or abandoned NI IP (Linx, gRPC, DCAF, Robotics Toolkit, Modbus, etc.). The goal of these is to keep improving the libraries for the community to use. But there are a few that will go back into the LabVIEW product (QuickDrop, Custom Probes, and Documentation).
