GPA recently announced a new roadmap for our Synchrophasor Products, including openPDC and openHistorian. As part of this roadmap, we will be transitioning from open-source applications to the open base model.
GPA remains committed to the principles of collaboration, transparency, and free access which are central to the open-source software development process. However, as GPA’s individual open-source products become mature, there is no longer the revenue that comes from donations, grants, and major feature expansion projects that can be used to meet the demand for necessary product maintenance. To assure that these mature GPA products have a consistent and predictable revenue stream to fuel production-grade product maintenance, GPA is moving to a “Open Base” product delivery model for its two most mature products, the openPDC and the openHistorian, both of which have been available for more than 10 years.
Under the Open Base model, GPA will continue to support and maintain a version of the openPDC and openHistorian as open-source products. However, in doing so, some features that are specifically designed to meet enterprise needs – like advanced security features, performance, scalability enhancements or third-party library integrations, e.g., ICCP – will be implemented as proprietary features and will only be available to those that have a GPA annual maintenance and support agreement.
Utilities and research institutions that already have GPA support and maintenance agreements will not be impacted by this change and will be migrated to the new Enterprise versions of the openPDC and openHistorian as part of their existing maintenance agreements.
By moving to the Open Base model for the openPDC and openHistorian, GPA hopes to serve both the open-source community and provide on-going maintenance and support for its paying clients at lowest cost.
In addition, GPA will simplify its product offerings by discontinuing a number of applications over the next year. We recognize several applications, such as openPDC and openHistorian, have a large, growing user base, while other products, like ADAPT, have not had the success and userbase we were hoping for. In order to focus our efforts on providing production-grade, modern applications we have made the decision to discontinue development efforts on some of our offerings. We will be maintaining all functionality currently available in those products but migrating some of that functionality in more appropriate offerings. As we get into 2025, we will be announcing more details on which products will be discontinued, but we are committed to ensure a smooth migration to alternative solutions and other GPA products as we move forward.