Open Source Labview core and $ for services, add-on's....

[pavanb]

I did a search on this forum to see if the subject been asked before but couldn't find it quickly, so I post. I have been seeing business push and pressure to move in this direction over the years, more so recently and have migrated to eclipse for my current project and like CDT. I saw the following today and it got me off my inertia to ask/feel the question here. I would venture that Operating systems and other mature s/w tools aren't rocket science anymore, but commodities and open-source w/ customization makes sense. Easier said that done. Thoughts?

pavan

This inspired me to ask the question:  The Eclipse Helios simultaneous release of 39 Eclipse projects and 33 million lines of code showcases the diversity and innovation going on inside the Eclipse ecosystem. In terms of statistics, the Helios release includes 33 million lines of code developed by about 500 Eclipse.org committers from 44 companies. The important thing to remember about Helios and Eclipse simultaneous releases in general is that even though it's a simultaneous release, it doesn't mean these projects are unified. Each project is a separate open source project within Eclipse.org, operating with its own project leadership, its own committers and its own development plan. The simultaneous-release concept is designed to provide a transparent and predictable development cycle.

Other ref:

Microsoft ups the ante in the robotics market, makes MSRDS free ... (see coments from emiliekopp)

CentOS, Ubuntu...

Eclipse & addons

Python

GCC

Octave

Scilab

Android (I think it is open?)

Open-office

ISO formats for docs

Open Car

Open prosthetics

...

The list goes on.

[pavanb]

If one looks at the T&M, controls market within DoD, DoE and other government arms/labs for C/gcc or Simulink users that can be using Labview (and in a few cases should be) and add other such organizations in Europe and Asia alone; the untapped market
(and risk of never being able to tap if action is delayed - lost opportunities) is tremendous, several billions of dollars in NI h/w, add-ons and services. There are people I have know over the years (in small businesses and the category above) that would have migrated, learnt and used Labview & NI if the s/w was free and training reasonable.

How should a company capture this segment?

[pavanb]

http://www.softwareexchange.com.sg/Company/AboutUs.aspx

[pavanb]

Checkout this out and the screenshot at the end.

http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/yakindu/

i.e.

http://svn.codespot.com/a/eclipselabs.org/yakindu/wiki/Pictures/SCT-screenshot.png

http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/8107/simulationappsmall.png

Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)

http://www.eclipse.org/gef/overview.html

How much money does an organization, government/taxpayer spend on just s/w licenses per year? The answer is mindblowing for Microsoft, Mathworks, Windriver, NI....

http://saveaward2010.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Stop-Double-Pay-to-Microsoft/61116-9432

http://saveaward2010.ideascale.com/a/dtd/LINUX-vs-$$+MICROSOFT+$$/47293-9432

http://forge.mil/Faqs.html#faqs1

If a consortium gave you $10 M/year to do something positive towards the s/w tools used by engineers in the spirit to spur innovation. Would you do a google summer or code on Matlab, Labview, Windriver, Microsoft or Scilab? Would you negotiate volume discounts with s/w vendors for your organization/agency? Would you gradually drop the cost of s/w? Would you make it open source?

Remember, don't shoot the messenger.

[pavanb]

For the record, I am ambivalent about my post. Socio-economic, technical and political aspects need resolution, which is complicated and slooow.

pavan

[cwolfskill]

I think all the ideas posted to this idea exchange are a perfect example of why it would be great to have Open Source LabVIEW.  If you really cared about an idea getting implemented, you could do it yourself, rather than having to wait for NI. Based on the fact that there are currently 0 of the thousands of ideas in here marked as In Development, it is clear that NI doesn't have enough developers to come even close to keeping up with the requests.  They should take advantage of the team of external developers who currently use their product and would like to see it get better to implement some of these ideas. 

Another benefit of going Open Source is for critical applications that need to have insight into their system all the way to the lowest level, and can't rely on LabVIEW as a black box that just works, because sometimes it doesn't.  In those instances you need to be able to dive in and troubleshoot at every layer.  

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 5 kudos within 5 years after posting will be automatically declined.