POWERLINK stack achieves record 20,000 downloads

"The decision to make openPOWERLINK available as a free download has brought sustained growth in the number of system integrators using this advanced communication standard,” says Stefan Schönegger, managing director of the Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group. "In addition to being free, POWERLINK is also the first and only industrial real-time Ethernet standard to fulfill every aspect of open source software – all of which have contributed to its success.”

openPOWERLINK, the open source software stack used to implement the POWERLINK real-time Ethernet communication standard, meets every criteria for open source software. Equipped for both master and slave implementations, it is available for a wide range of operating systems, including Windows, Linux (including real-time variants using the RT-preempt patch) and VxWorks, and has been designed for easy portability to any hardware platform and operating system.

Most significantly, openPOWERLINK is available under a BSD license, which grants system designers full rights to the software and makes POWERLINK the only truly vendor-independent Ethernet-based industrial communication standard around.