Why Open Source?! Open Source?!
The PowerMatcher Suite and Open Source
The Flexiblepower Alliance Network (FAN) is a non-profit organization which exists in order to help develop and distribute the PowerMatcher Suite.
The FAN strongly beliefs in the power of the open-source community, which is why PowerMatcher Suite is 100% open source under the Apache 2.0 License and in open development. If you want to contribute to PowerMatcher Suite, or need to adapt PowerMatcher Suite to satisfy the needs for your PowerMatcher Suite-based application, this is allowed. However we strongly encourage everybody to give back their findings and improvements to the community so the technology can grow as a whole.
Open sourcing the PowerMatcher Suite is a unique advantage in a smart grid world where most solutions are still proprietary. We believe it will propell the adoption and help the Suite become a worldwide standard. Bottom line is that in the end a lot of (smart) devices have to be connected to the smart grid. We believe this will go a whole lot faster if everybody can participate instead of us with a small team trying to connect every single device to our system.
All the software code is available on https://github.com/flexiblepower including documentation and a set of tutorials. Github enables social coding, easy version control and reporting of issues. The community welcomes new developers and contributions. It is not obligatory to be part of the alliance in order to contribute.
Not familiar with the concept of Open Source?
Here are some handy links:
There are multiple reasons to use the open source model. Here are some examples:
