The OPC Foundation has announced the open source availability of the OPC UA technology.
The open source repository of OPC UA is now available on the open source GitHub web site. Open source is a very important strategy to eliminate roadblocks to adoption of the technology. By open sourcing the OPC UA technology the OPC Foundation is now enabling easy access to the technology by academia and research organizations, as well as many suppliers and end-users that would like to assess the OPC UA technology as part of early adopter and feasibility analysis.
Open sourcing isn’t just the wave of the future. Open source strategy is now. The OPC Foundation is proud to make the OPC technology available to everyone via the open source repositories.
There are a number of OPC open-source initiatives already available from suppliers, research institutes and academia for OPC UA. The open source repository from the OPC Foundation is intended to supplement these other open-source initiatives, providing additional value. The OPC Foundation has committed resources to moderate/maintain and extend the technology to keep pace with technology changes in the industry as well as the extensions to the OPC UA architecture and corresponding companion specification.
The OPC Foundation has always followed the model of validating the OPC specifications by requiring reference implementations prior to releasing any OPC specifications. This strategy guarantees that the OPC specifications are not just academic, as the reference implementation validates that the technology solves real-world problems and can be adopted into real products. The availability of the OPC UA technology as open-source allows OPC to be leveraged in many additional markets providing information integration and interoperability from the embedded world to the cloud.
The OPC Community is made up of suppliers, end-users, OEMs that use and develop products based on the OPC technology. Open sourcing the OPC technology does not compete with the OPC toolkit members or decrease the value proposition of membership in the OPC Foundation. The companies that build OPC toolkit products accelerate rapid development of OPC UA products, and these companies provide complete documentation and 24/7 support to enable product quality OPC UA products to be developed. The OPC Foundation value proposition of membership is to provide a complete infrastructure for developing and marketing OPC based products, inclusive of providing the OPC Foundation certification program, that allows suppliers to certify and validate the interoperability of their products to the OPC standards.
“The OPC Foundation commitment to the end users and suppliers is to increase awareness of the OPC technology, and the vision is to be the solution for the Internet of everything, inclusive of industrie 4.0, IIoT, IoT, and M2M. The industry has recognized the importance of open source as a strategy for international acceptance and evangelism of technology, and many organizations and industries active in IoT won’t even look at a technology unless it’s available as open-source”, says Thomas J. Burke, OPC Foundation President & Executive Director.
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