We just published pvbrowser-4.4.8 our Open Source project for SCADA.

I would be interested in your opinion about Open Source solutions in SCADA.

- Did you try Open Source solutions ?
- Which Open Source solution do you use or have evaluated ?
- Do your customers accept Open Source at all ?

 

I'm not involved with SCADA systems, but the feedback that I get from my own open source software leads me to suspect that it's not usually the end customer who cares about whether a system is open source. It's the integrator or occasionally someone who is acting as an in-house integrator for a project they were given to do. I said "usually" it's the integrator, but sometimes it is the customer because they don't want to be joined at the hip for the life of the system to a single vendor or integrator.

They're also usually more technically adept than the average integrator even if they're not an expert on exactly what you have done. Normally, it seems they're not simply taking the software and installing it. They're customising it or using it as part of a larger project. The customer is probably seeing the finished system, and may not know what components went into it.

For my own software, I made an effort to make it easy to replace the brand name and "look and feel" with whatever name the integrator wants to put on it. I don't know how many are taking advantage of that.

I'm basing the above just on contacts with people who have discussed their projects with me. I don't have any real market stats for this though.

Oh, and Debian Stable seems to be a very popular platform for larger projects, which isn't what I would have guessed to begin with.