Letter to the editor: Open-source software libraries from camera vendors

AtVision Systems Design, we periodically receive specific technical questions from our readers that we are either able to answer directly, or connect them with someone who can. In other cases, such as this one, we are putting it out to the community for feedback and suggestions.

Dan Saldana, Staff Electrical Engineer, Broadridge Customer Communications, reached out to us about camera vendors. Specifically, he wanted to know if they had any ideas about open sourcing their software libraries. Below is the letter from Saldana. If you have any feedback or suggestions about this, I welcome you to reach out and let us know bysending us an e-mail.

I thought of one more subject that may be worth exploring with the various camera vendors. It would be interesting to hear about their ideas about open-sourcing their software libraries, e.g. placing the source code on Github. Maybe some of the vendors are already moving in that direction?

As an integrator of various cameras, it would be very helpful if my team could directly see and analyze what the vendor-provided libraries are doing. We went through some pain making “Company A” and “Company B” GigE cameras play well together on the same host; eventually “Company A” told us how to control “Company B” cameras with their library so that we could uninstall the other company’s library.

I know that camera vendors claim that their products conform to various standards, but in the real world, there always seem to be kinks or other issues that trip you up. If an integrator has the skill to understand—and perhaps customize—a vendor’s library code to make their jobs easier, why wouldn’t the vendors let that happen? After all, they want to sell more camera hardware, don’t they? Even Microsoft is moving toward open source, with much of their source code on Github today.

-Dan Saldana, Staff Electrical Engineer,Broadridge Customer Communications

As mentioned above, if you have any feedback to this scenario, please follow up bysending us an e-mail.

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