
Ask HN: Can you transition from trade secrets to open source? - softwaremoat
Mostly just looking for people submit ideas on the main topic, but if you&#x27;re interested you can read about
my specific situation below.<p>I have unique knowledge&#x2F;experience about how a variety of industrial equipment and computer systems communicate,
and how the software to allow them to communicate should be designed.
Right now, it&#x27;s very difficult to make these devices&#x2F;systems communicate, but at the company where I work
we&#x27;re creating software which uses the knowledge I have to greatly simplify the process.
Companies have happily paid us large amounts of money just for the beta version of our product.
I&#x27;m currently the only active developer.<p>On the one hand, there is a need to protect critical portions of this code. But in an ideal world,
there would be some way to profit from the useful software we&#x27;re creating while opening source access
to the world. I would absolutely be open to ideas about that, or experiences people have had.<p>At the very least, I would like to avoid internally segregating our code base for future developers.
However, how would we prevent a VC funded competitor from poaching one of our developers and gaining
access to knowledge it would have taken them years or decades to acquire?<p>Are some businesses only viable with closed source, internally segregated, software? Or, is it inevitable that
all source will leak anyway, so you should try to create a model which does not rely on proprietary information?
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karpodiem
"I have unique knowledge/experience about how a variety of industrial
equipment and computer systems communicate, and how the software to allow them
to communicate should be designed."

Your knowledge is the foundation, but the real value is at the ease of use
layer. That's what your customers are paying for - your software solves
problems for them. If it's easy to use, they will solve their problems faster.

I work at a mid-cap ERP company in the Midwest, I'd be interested in hearing
more about your software.

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based2
[https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/241/what-is-a-
whi...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/241/what-is-a-white-box-
implementation-of-a-cryptographic-algorithm)

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kevinherron
I'm curious - what kind of industrial equipment and communication protocols
are you talking about? PLCs? Something else?

~~~
softwaremoat
PLCs are one of the devices we might communicate with. Not the sort of thing
I'd call a trade secret though. I don't want to go into too much detail, but
we've done a good deal of work with undocumented/poorly documented/difficult
to work with APIs and network protocols (and serial communications). We're
able to provide more functionality than equipment manufacturers in some cases,
and do so within a single piece of software which works with a large variety
of machines. The idea is to provide a unified API for all equipment which
provides stock functionality for customers too small to have developers on
staff.

~~~
kevinherron
Sounds a lot like the OPC servers we already have in the industrial automation
industry.

~~~
softwaremoat
Overlapping functionality for sure. I think the primary difference is that
there's not stock MES built into something like kepware, which keeps a large
number of smaller manufacturers from using it. An API on its own is useless to
them. OPC (UA) is one of the protocols we offer as an endpoint, but to be
honest I think OPC (again, UA) is too complex for most use cases. It's a good
protocol, but there's not enough tooling built up around it yet, and it's very
much geared toward large enterprise. Not to mention the saga of legal issues
it just escaped from. We also offer an HTTP API which uses swagger and swagger
UI for documentation and testing, and normalize data across machine types
before storing it in a database. This allows a company to grow from our
opinionated MES into their own customized system as they grow. Additionally,
we offer two way integrations with ERP systems. There are some other common
interconnectivity applications required by most of the manufacturers we work
with (we've been doing services for a long time and have 1000+ active service
customers). These are not commonly covered by OPC servers, but are covered
within our software.

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maxbaines
I'm reading this with some interest, as this is what my company and I do too!
[http://cncdata.co.uk](http://cncdata.co.uk) what you have written here is
almost scary like reading my own words.

To answer your original post, my opinion is in Industry & digital factory, for
it to succeed we must look to whats come before in software.

It's inevitable long term that protecting the unique knowledge we have is not
the model of success for the industry, hasn't it always been this way? Sure we
can make good money but overall does industry win?

We're about to open source everything we do, that's a Web API for Machine
Data, MES, Quality systems and all of our Machine connectors, OPC/UA and
Propriety. check out [http://openindustry.org](http://openindustry.org)

~~~
kevinherron
I’ll keep an eye on openindustry.org. I’m the author and maintainer of an open
source OPC UA stack/SDK.

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dyeje
You could always do a non compete if you're that worried about employees
taking knowledge to competitors.

