The project welcomes contributions of all types; documentation, code changes, new plugins, scripts, just simply reports of the way you use Fledge or suggestions of features you would like to see within Fledge.
The Community’s History
Zededa introduced Dianomic to the LF Edge before its inception and asked Dianomic to join as a founding board member. In that effort, Zededa and Dianomic worked with Mike Woster to encourage OSIsoft, to also join as founding members. The original idea was and remains to build a thriving open source industrial community. This is a challenge to the Linux Foundation in that industrial companies are not traditional open source users. The OT side of the Industrial market tends not to be software/compute experts, they are machine and process experts. So how have we grown the Fledge community and intend to exponentially grow it going forward?
To date the following companies are involved in coding, testing, writing documentation and contributing to the roadmap requirements.
Beckhoff - PLC Vendor | Nexcom - Industrial Gateways |
Dianomic - IIoT Software | Nokia - Wireless Communications |
Flir - IR/Gas Cameras | OSIsoft - Data Infrastructure |
General Atomics - Predator Drone | Rovisys - Industrial SI |
Google - Search-ML-Cloud-TPUs | Transpara - HMI for Process Manufacturers |
JEA - Energy/Water Company | Wago - PLC Vendor |
Motorsports.ai - Racing Digital Twins | Zededa - VMs for IoT |
All of these companies got involved due to use cases driving community participation. This organic community growth has accelerated during Covid not diminished. And, now with Fledge 1.8 complete, the new contributions will be made clearer with the LF Edges processes in place for all to track.
Second, there are a few anchor tenants in the industrial market and machine learning space that will grow the Fledge community with their involvement. OSIsoft has 22,000 servers deployed. Native connections to ISA95 systems grows the Fledge community. Google is arguably the premier ML supplier in the world. Google has contributed the Fledge North plugin to GC. Fledge will soon have 3 new major ML services contributed to Fledge from GC and Google will begin marketing those solutions with Fledge. In this effort, the Fledge community has sponsored multiple meetings between the LF Edge and Google to join.
Last, being focused on the industrial market means the community is focused too. Like most communications, speaking to the needs and requirements using a known/shared vocabulary is critical. Fledge with the LF Edge’s help communicates to these new types of users and prospective community members using “OT Speak” not computer jargon. Starting with our Fledge Mascot a fledgling peregrine falcon wearing a hard hat.