The ISA's Industrial Computing Online reports . . .

A movement to develop Linux-based programmable logic controller (PLC) technology is being launched by participants in an online e-mailing list. The host of the widely used Automation List, Control Technology Corp. and Control.com Inc., has agreed to provide the venue and discussion resources to carry on the project, informally being called the… “Open Source Control” effort.

“I envision a process similar to the other 'open source' projects on the 'net today — online discussion groups for developers and users, an online source control system, and publicly available code,” Control.com president Ken Crater told ISA OnLine.

“The Open Source Control effort addresses an economic imperative — not merely to save money on software purchases, but rather to finally gain meaningful control over a critical link in the enterprise information chain,” Crater said. “Proprietary architectures can only stand in the way of information flows — and the supplier community has amply demonstrated its inability or unwillingness to deliver open systems in any meaningful sense of the phrase,” he said.

“Just as the open source methodology has delivered a highly successful, secure, and well-supported operating system (Linux) and webserver (Apache), along with a host of ancillary applications and tools, so too can such a technique deliver a robust and secure control system. The overwhelming popularity of these products, and the outstanding commercial success of the companies supporting and applying them, testify to the viability of the approach.

Crater said he disagrees with those who think Linux can't be used for industrial control applications. “Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing so fundamentally different about control as to make the use of open source technologies impractical for this purpose. Quite the opposite — in these days of frequent corporate recombinations, the use of software supported by a broad-based user community can provide the greatest security of all,” he said.

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(ISA is the international society for measurement and control — www.isa.org)

 
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