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.
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