I agree, especially on ngcgui. I want to do dome work with that once my arduino pendant project is done. Currently I am designing some PCBs for that and getting my code cleaned up. I'm thinking about selling kits but releasing the source openly. It's interesting from the perspective of looking at how you make money in an open-source environment. The bar for value add is definitely a lot higher. Even hardware is tricky if you factor in the Chinese eBay clones that will follow any successful product.
In end user terms, EMC2 is plagued by the same crisis of abundance that Linux has. For everything you want to do, there are five possible options, all of which are somewhat incomplete, and none of which are documented. I run a software company I started six years ago, and there is nothing more frustrating than the weeks of work it takes to deal with the final 5% or so of feature completeness and bug fixing. I would love to ditch that and move on to building something new, but customers won't let me get away with that. So here we have HAL, classic ladder, and user modules all serving related purposes in controlling and configuring machines. It gives you great flexibility but it's not easy if you haven't done it before. Compare this to Mach, where almost everything boils down to menus and macros. The integration of the GUI and backend makes custom functionality quite easy. In my view the underlying core has some serious limitations but for many users these are probably less important than the simplicity and familiarity with windows. I am also impressed with the level of activity on Mach forums, not just raw numbers but the projects people are working on. It sometimes feels like EMC is for people who like building machines while Mach is for people who like using them. This is partly unfair but it is there. I think more commercial users would bring a lot more focus to improving the rough edges that most of us are used to living with. I don't see a Red Hat model for it yet though. I think you would need to offer a complete brain in a box, both hardware and software. The low end of the market (eg Tormach) will need a lot more simplicity as they don't want to deal with people who have problems with Ubuntu. And the high end I don't see switching without a really good reason. Linux rose because customers wanted to get away from expensive proprietary hardware. Where is the x86 of the CNC world? Will the Chinese figure out how to make a machine for half the price of Gene Haas? Outside of that, customers and vendors seem to be in equilibrium. Vendors compete in large part on their controls and would want to continue doing so. Sent from my iPhone On Dec 9, 2010, at 11:21 AM, Igor Chudov <ichu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Colin, I agree. While I have big reservations about the genuiness of > the offer that started this topic, I would be personally excited by a > commercial project that would use EMC2, while complying with its > licensing. > > The separation of control and GUI that exists in EMC means that we can > have competing UIs, some of which may be more suitable to "machine > operators" using them, as opposed to DIY tinkerers. As a DIY tinkerer, > I personally am happy with the existing UI, though I wish for somewhat > better integration of subroutines into wizards, along the lines of > ngcgui. > > In any case, the best hoped for outcome would be that some large > enhancements of EMC2 would make it back to us to be reused elsewhere. > Say, machine builders would contribute to EMC2 to make their machines > controllable by EMC. This is not very far fetched, since this is what > happens to the Linux kernel. > > i > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
