In short, Clearpath shares your feelings and goals, and I believe the OSRF does as well.
In our discussions with OSRF leading up to this survey, our primary consideration was maintaining and expanding the current ROS community and infrastructure much as it is today. The best way to do that is to plan for years in advance and assume that the various grants and contracts which allowed the OSRF to start up in a sustainable way will at some point stop.
Thus, it follows that OSRF must find sources of revenue elsewhere, or else become a contract software shop itself. Working on contracts is much less in service of the OSRF's
mission than begin able to work on fully community-directed projects.
In discussions both at OSRF and Clearpath, we came to the conclusion that the majority of the major institutions and businesses which are receiving value from ROS will nonetheless be unable to simply donate to the OSRF. Therefore, we need to provide a way where funding the OSRF makes business sense. Support and other similar efforts are beneficial in particular because though support efforts may be for specific clients at first, the improved documentation, knowledge base, and bugfixes can benefit the entire community.
And, to address another question which will likely be going through a few people's minds: Clearpath is taking these first steps because we too heavily rely on ROS, we understand the needs of the community, and we already have the infrastructure to make this happen (since we already provide support for hundreds of ROS users). Though we will no doubt make a profit on this endeavour, that is not our primary goal. Our own long term plans depend on ROS & the ROS community continuing to grow in the way it already has, therefore we must do what we can to make this possible.
Most importantly, if we go forward with offering services like this ourselves, we intend that a share of the profit goes to the OSRF to directly support core development efforts. We believe we're the right team to provide support to these large companies, but OSRF should continue to be the nucleus of the ROS community. A general outline of that arrangement will be made available to the ROS community if and when we take those next steps.
I hope this helps.
-Ryan
.