On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Colin K <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >
I am extremely and openly critical of many open source products, but I have to say that EMC2 is on top as far as documentation, ease of configuration, etc is concerned. To add to this excellent support, and you would know why I am very happy. EMC2 is also very stable. The documentation is clear, abundant, and actually correct. The tasks that users try to accomplish with EMC2, such as retrofitting old machines or making new machines, are daunting and many of us are first timers, myself included. This is why using EMC2 is so difficult, not because EMC2 is hard to use. I had to learn everything about CNC as part of my project. i ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
