Collaborations across open-source communities

[Alex Liberzon]

Hi ALL,

hope you do well.

I'd like to discuss with the community and hope to get many responses on the following question - how would you like to see the open source PIV community to manage their software development - separately or jointly?

For instance, there's a new PIV software in Python, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352711022001741 that refers to OpenPIV in Python and Matlab and also to our work on GPU clusters, but takes a different branch and re-develops the DPIVSoft in Matlab with Python and OpenCL (GPU). Seems very good, of course, requires some time to develop their community and gain users. On one hand we're kind of competitors over the users attraction, though they do admit we're established and have an efficient code, I quote:

"the Python version of OpenPIV-Python produces a speedup of 1.65 with respect to the DPIVSoft-Python version" (Thanks to all the developers of OpenPIV)

On the other hand, why would the two similar softwares compete, wouldn't it be better if we jointly develop a new version which tries to incorporate the best of both?

Please, tell what you think - shall we approach the authors of DPIVSoft to try to create the next version or work in parallel and let the competition to create a better software by evolution?

Thanks

Alex

[Ivan Nepomnyashchikh]

Hello Dr. Liberzon,

I agree with you. I have noticed a lot of different PIV pieces of software written by a variety of different research groups. To my mind, the only advantage of writing your own PIV software is to learn all of the details of how PIV works.

For "everyday" work, though, one would want a reliable and proven PIV package. Therefore, once one has gained an invaluable experience writing his own software, he could become a good contributor to an established PIV package. That, indeed, will do a great deal of good to the one and to the rest of the PIV community.

I think approaching the DPIVSoft authors is a good idea and - even though I recognize my absolute useless to the OpenPIV development so far - I can sign the letter to the DPIVSoft folks or help crafting it or do whatever is deemed necessary.

Ivan