I was curious to hear experiences of anyone who has played around or used Proview on a project. How stable / mature is it right now?

http://www.proview.se/v3/

To make it clear, I'm not talking of a safety critical or downtime critical project. But stuff that's more mundane and currently not highly instrumented so there's acceptable margin for failure without things turning into a crisis.

There's some small plants that are currently non PLC & non DCS and have innocuous utilities like cooling water lines that can do with some logging to start with.

Would Proview be a good fit? Or is it just too raw yet?

 

The problem I see with all open source stuff is there is no incentive for the people who wrote the code to maintain it, and often maintaining the code costs more over time than writing it in the first place.

Linux and Unix and Open Office have been relatively successful but what is the business model for it? There isn't one. There is no way to make a direct profit from updating and maintaining it. Other people benefit more than the people doing the work. How it has managed to get as far along as it has amazes me sometimes.

For a product like this to be a market success means you are going to have to get some long term support from some big guys who are willing to do it out of the goodness of their black little hearts. Not a lot of that out there these days.

 

I think the success of the Model depends on a case by case basis. Linux has been a mega success & has spawned a huge ecosystem of successful open source projects stable enough for enterprise use (e.g. Apache, mysql, RAID mdadm, most compilers, Android etc. )

So I won't dismiss Open Source Controls outright. But, yes, whether Proview itself becomes successful or not only time can tell.

Even in very related niche domains there's high quality circuit design / chip design tools that have been open sourced.

Surprisingly, in the IT sector lots of small companies have made a very successful business model selling services, support and customization around a free, open source, project.