Anyone is free to download, improve and perfect the software, and use it as they wish, as long as they contribute their improvements back to the community. Passion drives Linux more than business pragmatism. However, the OS is now far too successful to consider it a mere curiosity. In this interview, Curt Wuollet describes why Linux is a rock-solid foundation for a control system and why our industry desperately needs to reject the politics of proprietary solutions and embrace the philosophy of open architecture cooperation. By the time you really know a product line, you've made a huge investment, and you still have questions.
Control engineers spend one hell of a lot of time just getting things to work as advertised.
We spend a lot of time working around problems. We spend a lot of time finding out if the things will do what we need to do. These are the investments that are so costly that once you pay for them, you almost never see anyone switch PLC vendors. It's a lack of information. To get the information you need, you have to discover it by trial and error.