hi,
i am new to aruino and also electronics. i am from india i want to know if open source provide ready made library. still most of companies dont go with open source for comercial production. they start writting code from basic or BUY costaly library or adk. why is there any disadvantage of arduino. is arduino usrd for comercial perpose in your country.
Most companies are afraid of open source software, as anyone could write in or find (by reading the source) a back door or security exploit.
Also open source hardaware/software often doesn't have the same level of support as hardware/software you buy.
Arduino can be used for commerical use, but it won't be arudino's fault if your project breaks something or hurt someone.
(Some linux distributions and things like apache are major exceptions to the above)
cnavnath:
still most of companies dont go with open source for comercial production.
Actually, quite a few companies do rely on open source for commercial products. Rarely will it be advertised on the box, because most (e.g. 99% who are not engineers) consumers do not care.
cnavnath:
they start writting code from basic or BUY costaly library or adk.
Sometimes it is because the company, or the engineering team at that company, wants/needs support. Commercial support comes with financial commitments, open source support does not.
Sometimes it is because open source libraries are not complete.
Sometimes it is because open source licenses means revealing work the engineering team has done, and the company does not wish that to happen.
Sometimes engineers simply don't know about an open-source option.
cnavnath:
why is there any disadvantage of arduino. is arduino usrd for comercial perpose in your country.
There are always trade-offs. The "disadvantages" depends on your situation.
This, like all engineering puzzles, isn't a "black and white" or "yes/no" kind of thing. You must look at multiple elements and determine the best solution. The idea "BECAUSE ITS OPEN SOURCE!!!!" is not always the best solution for a given problem.
[quote author=James C4S link=topic=107002.msg803477#msg803477 date=1337782568]
cnavnath:
still most of companies dont go with open source for comercial production.
Actually, quite a few companies do rely on open source for commercial products. Rarely will it be advertised on the box, because most (e.g. 99% who are not engineers) consumers do not care.[/quote]
Agree, I work for a company that make industrial machinery, we have 4 active products and all of them use Linux and one is made with a Arduino, of course, none of our customers care about it.
[quote author=James C4S link=topic=107002.msg803477#msg803477 date=1337782568]
cnavnath:
they start writting code from basic or BUY costaly library or adk.
Sometimes it is because the company, or the engineering team at that company, wants/needs support.
Sometimes it is because open source libraries are not complete.
Sometimes it is because open source licenses means revealing work the engineering team has done, and the company does not wish that to happen.
Sometimes engineers simply don't know about an open-source option.[/quote]
+1
cnavnath:
The idea "BECAUSE ITS OPEN SOURCE!!!!" is not always the best solution for a given problem.
From the engineering perspective, it's not a valid reason.
AntonioM:
[quote author=James C4S link=topic=107002.msg803477#msg803477 date=1337782568]
The idea "BECAUSE ITS OPEN SOURCE!!!!" is not always the best solution for a given problem.
From the engineering perspective, it's not a valid reason.[/quote]
+1, Back at you.
There are a lot of advantages to open source. Of course, just being open source "per se" doesn't make the solution good.
- You have the source. If the company that produced the product goes broke, you can fix it yourself.
- Peer review - bugs will be found by others reviewing your code.
- Closed source has no real reason to fix bugs because people don't know they are there. Until later ...
- Someone can look at the source and suggest improvements, or simply release an improved version.
- You can check for back doors, or other dodgy practices.
- The notion that a couple of people employed by one company can produce better code than the combined resources of experts around the world is rather arrogant.
- You don't need to worry about the company "reviewing their licensing" (ie. putting up the price) once they have you dependent on their product
In fact many commercial products use open source. For example, things like routers, networks disks, etc. You will find buried away in their documentation a reference to the GPL usually.
Take, for example, Apple. A well-known highly successful company. See this page:
From that:
Major components of Mac OS X, including the UNIX core, are made available under Apple’s Open Source license, allowing developers and students to view source code, learn from it and submit suggestions and modifications.
and:
Apple believes that using Open Source methodology makes Mac OS X a more robust, secure operating system, as its core components have been subjected to the crucible of peer review for decades. Any problems found with this software can be immediately identified and fixed by Apple and the Open Source community.
Targettio:
(Some linux distributions and things like apache are major exceptions to the above)
"An exception disproves the rule." -- Sherlock Holmes
I strongly suspect that is how some of the bigger "open source" organization (eg. MySQL) make money. They release open software, but then offer support (eg. programming, problem solving) for a price. And why not? After all, "open source" doesn't mean "free support".
And there is nothing to stop proper contracts being drawn up, to provide agreed-upon levels of support, by competent staff, to support the underlying code. None of that violates the open source concept.
There are also commercial companies spending time and money (programmers) to improve open source as it is easier than starting from ground up.
And there are (small) companies that add features to OS on request (for an hour price or fixed bill)
On the other hand there are commercial products that are just the defacto standard like WORD and Excel or AutoCAD. COmpanies use them to communicate with other companies and unless your 100% compatible you are not in business. (I recall that word on MAC and PC same version were not 100% compatible some time)
Also large corporations require that SW can be installed unattended and upgraded on thousands of PC's overnight. AFAIK the OS community don't have solutions for that (yet).
Finally there is something like trust, do you trust something that comes for free? or do you trust something you have paid for? that's psychological....
For big commercial companies there is an additional reason.
When a big company (10.000+) implements a product "company wide" they spend quite some money (5 figures at least; probably 6 figures). Making installation package; updating internal databases; changing processes; training people; doing data migration; building support site.
When you do this investment you want to have "some sort of control" on the product so you know your investment is not lost.
This is something Open source proved not to deliver. There have been plenty of good open source product where only a shadow of itself remained in a short time; simply because a better open source product appeared (with my background I think about cvs -> subversion -> git).
The people in the 2 communities do not care about data/process migration.
As a big company with a company wide usage of this tool you are faced with following questions: Are there tools to migrate your 1billion documents to the better tool? (Very unlikely.) How much will it cost to train your people to learn the new tool? (well again at least 5 figures) How much will it cost to continue development of the tool yourself? (Didn't we make the developers redundant as we implemented this great tool?)
I'm not saying that these risks do not exist with commercial tools. The risks are only higher. It is up to the company to decide which risks they take and which they want to avoid.
Greetings from Belgium
Jantje
Open source is used, but often a large company has a large base of code that is just to big to migrate. Recently read an article about CoBoL. The large banking companies have a HUGE inventory of CoBoL programs that are still in everyday use. They need people to maintain those programs, because those programs work, are reliable and to migrate over to a newer/different language would entail a HUGE cost and possibly introduce errors that have already been taken care of in the existing code base. New projects are written in newer languages but that takes time.
An example of open source - Android. Oracle either tried to limit the ability of Android to remain open source, or lost that case on purpose (why else hire Bois & Schiller). Look at http://source.android.com/.
Many companies are using Linux boxes as file servers, web servers, mail servers, ftp servers. There are a number of Linux based boxes that can be bought and hooked to the network that handle these functions and they are all based on Linux. Our firewall here is a Linux based design.