As I wrote in 2022, in my article Your free trial of open-source has expired, I have stopped providing free community support for Apache PLC4X in my free time.
I didn’t stop working on features, new drivers, doing the house-keeping and mentoring possible new contributors.
However, I had to do this in my free time, and I am feeling how it’s burning me out. So, I’ve decided to stop working on PLC4X completely in my free time.
My current employer grants be 4 hours per week, and I will use that time to continue working on PLC4X, but this will limit my involvement to Friday afternoons.
If the industry needs help or wants anything to happen, they can either do it themselves, find someone who’s able and willing to do it for them or hire me via Timecho and pay for development. For small things you can drop me a donation (See list of links at the end of the article).
Long version with loads of background infos in the link.
If you read my article carefully: I started the first steps on this 10 years ago ... then I was trying to build something proprietary, but gave up on it as it was an insane amount of work for one person financing himself.
After that I started really getting involved with Apache and all sorts of projects.
5 years after my first attempt I started a new attempt, this time open-source and that worked from a project perspective.
I wrote it in my own blog, because I am stopping free commmunity support for myself. It's not the project stoping this. Apache is a non-profit charity and it's dangerous for it to be accused of having monetary interests in what it does.
In order to separate what I had to say from the project I published it on my blog and not even on the mailinglist (I sent a link though explaining why I'll be less active).
Hope that explains things. The title of this thread however was a bit mis-leading.
When I started to work on PLC4X I was hoping people would be using it to build commercial applications and either making money with it, saving money or building better products. That's why I stronly believe in the Apache License and am not a GPL advocate.
However I would never have expected that allmost nothing is returned by anyone.
I mean, I'm an IT consultant and I was doing consulting with other projects that I work on and I'm fine with that. I love doing that, I love giving training, mentoring people and companies to become open-source contributors. I saw that the effort-to-improvement-ratio open-source could bring to the automation industry was just incredible 5 years ago. That's why I put so much work into the project and I continue doing so ... just differently ;-)
geee ... a friend pointed me here and I have to admit that I'm quite overwhelmed by the wave my post generated. But very happy it seeded some good discussions.
However I should point out that only I said that I would stop providing free community support. I am only one of the contributors. Even if I am probalby one of the most active ones, there are still others probably going to step up and tackle the one or the other issue someone might come up with.
If the project was just me, Apache would probably have already moved the project into the atic, which is far from happening :-)
Now I'll continue reading all of this ... but I had to set this straight first.
I didn’t stop working on features, new drivers, doing the house-keeping and mentoring possible new contributors.
However, I had to do this in my free time, and I am feeling how it’s burning me out. So, I’ve decided to stop working on PLC4X completely in my free time.
My current employer grants be 4 hours per week, and I will use that time to continue working on PLC4X, but this will limit my involvement to Friday afternoons.
If the industry needs help or wants anything to happen, they can either do it themselves, find someone who’s able and willing to do it for them or hire me via Timecho and pay for development. For small things you can drop me a donation (See list of links at the end of the article).
Long version with loads of background infos in the link.