Additional benefit of 3rd party opc software [closed]

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I am planning to add an opc server to my software package.

I have looked at the OPC Foundation's help page and I also downloaded the OPC UA .NET SDK made by a company called Softing (there are others too). Looking at the downloaded software I do not understand if I actually just downloaded software that is provided by the OPC Foundation or if there is an additional value provided by the Softing SDK. I wonder if one cannot obtain the OPC Foundation SDK as a non-member and has to go through vendors?

Would someone be able to clarify this?

Answer 1

OPC Foundation has discontinued the development of the UA SDK and it is now available as a sample project only for members.

It is recommended to check the commercial SDKs, which will provide you a real product level support, etc. The situation is now similar with all major environments: .NET, Java and C/C++.

There are already several SDKs which have been developed after OPC Foundation made the decision to leave the field to the SDK vendors.

OPC Foundation is now concentrating on the maintenance and development of the OPC UA Stack components only.

The stack components take care of the actual communication protocol, whereas the SDKs provide implementations for the basic services. Take a look at https://www.prosysopc.com/opc-ua-about.php for a detailed explanation.