[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [ROS-Industrial] Reliability, safety, security, maintenance and support in ROS

Davide Faconti ros.discourse at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 09:33:09 UTC 2018





It is an interesting article.



The main takeaway for me is that ROS community prefer to go broad (the more, the better) whilst a typical robotic product need to do deeper.



In the specific context of mobile robot navigation, it is not surprising that some commercially available solutions are better, since they could focus full time on a single use case.



Additionally, I believe that ROS was designed from the ground up as a easy-to-learn framework for non experts; this is, at the same time, its biggest strength and weakness, since the openesses of the system also makes very hard to deal with safety.



About the comparison table: I do not agree with a few points and it feels a little bit biased, even if I agree on most of the items (80% maube?)

There is one in particular that I consider very interesting:



**COST -> ROS (Weark)**



> Open source is free; the effort to make it a reliable and safe system is unpredictable.



This is SO true; I have countless examples of situation in which I would be better served in the long term by an expensive COTS solution rather than the open-source "free" one.



I have been complaining a lot about the open source model and the issue of sustainability. I like open source software (hey, I have my own OSS projects!), but it is naive to expect that:



1. The quality of an horizontal OSS software match the quality of a vertical and commercial one.

2. That it is possible to create high quality software without a sustainable way to pay full-time, highly-skilled developers.



Thanks for sharing the article.



Davide











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