[spauldo]

I totally agree.

A major change in my field over the last few years is the rise of Ignition, a SCADA suite that's taking over everywhere. And sure, it's got simpler and cheaper licensing than it's rivals. But for our projects, licensing cost isn't generally a factor.

What Inductive Automation did was open up their documentation, offer good online training for free, have an endless demo mode that can be reset indefinitely, and a "maker" version that can be used for free. Oh, and it's scripted with Python instead of some janky BASIC knock-off. All features that appeal to integrators but that don't matter to the end users.

I don't think it's a coincidence.