Ive been reading all over the place for the last couple of years about Open source having already gone mainstream. I dont disagree one bit. Linux, Python, PHP, Apache, MySQL etc .. just some of the poster boys of the Open Source community that have seen massive successes in being adopted by industry. I have been through these times as a student when evangelism was the order of the day, install fests aplenty. Things have definitely changed now. With heavy weights like Google, Yahoo and a whole ton of start-ups throwing their weight behind the use and deployment of OSS. OSS got "hot".

Ok now looking from the other side of the glass, as an employee in the Automation industry, things are a whole lot different. Traditionally the IA world is slow in adoption of technology that originates from the "consumer" world. There is good reason for this. Product life cycles here are of the order of decades rather than years. Safety is a big deal and a whole lot of other considerations that are very valid.


But things are changing. I believe we are now at an inflection point and things are going to change for the better. There is a lot of interest from automation and automotive companies across to the board. The Hanover Fair this year has a pavilion dedicated to Open source in the automation indsutry. OSADL is organizing a Congress which will feature talks from some of the most recognizable names in the OSS world.

Being invoIved with this, I can now really imagine the kind of effort that organizations must have put in to make that shift to move away from deploying proprietary software to OSS.

This blog has been dormant for a while, and I never believed that it had to too many readers anyway. But nonetheless, here is an advert of sorts.

My employer is hiring

Hi,
  this is xxxx, calling  form wind river..It's regarding to downloading software Gpp_LE_1.3 from our web site…."www.windriver.com"  you had visit our site so plz  send me back following information
 
  Q.Do you wanna any  technical support from us?
 Q. Are you working on some project or plaining for develop some application  by using our soft ware?
               
  Q. Are you  palining for purchase  some Product from our company for ur project?

Can you tell me what is cause for visting our site..? So it may be possible that  I can help you…if you wanna any help from my side ..just call me on my number
 that is 080-663xxx22..or you can mail me on my id which is
"xxxx@windriver.com"


 
Thanks
   & 
With  Regards,
 xxxx
Wind river
xxxx

This was WindRivers communication to me today. Im aghast at the quality of emails the marketing guys in Bangalore write. I mean dont they have someone who co-ordinates this activity ? Its not some tiny company that goes spamming around the place. Its WindRiver for heavens sake !! I confirmed that this person really exists after calling the stated number, its no automated spam.

Scott Rosenberg has done a prettty good job chronicling Chandler in his Book "Dreaming in Code". Its a very interesting story of any typical software project and its pitfalls. Reading through it I think most of us can picture ourselves being in a situation like that sometime in the past.

Towards the end he talks about processes and how they have shaped todays software industry. My employer is one of those companies who has jumped onto the CMMi bandwagon and we ( my group ) have had to swim against the tide a little to stay within this framework and still get work done and not spend hours filling up stupid Word Document templates. Its been tough but I think we are getting there (just about). We have now come up with blog, a wiki and a concoction of other tools (some hacked up using PHP and MySQL) and put together an application that still falls in the CMMi framework and makes life really simple and enjoyable for folks like me. I call it the PAL ( Process Abstraction Layer , actually a pun against Process Asset Library). The popularity of this concocted tool is growing and there are people in the organization (across geographies) who cannot believe that people can give away such amaazing software for FREE !!

A long story cut short. Its been immensly satisfying to say the least.

Why am I trying to flog a dead horse. DTS is the way to go.