[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Discussion on ROS to ROS2 transition plan

Devon Ash ros.discourse at gmail.com
Tue Oct 16 16:51:52 UTC 2018



Given the fact that no one here has any examples of porting ROS1 code to ROS2, except for a scheduled interest by @Vilas_Chitrakara, I'm going to believe that this entire discussion is speculation because no one knows the real resources required to port a system from ROS1 to ROS2 or if that effort is greater than maintaining a ROS1 release. 

I've predicted this before and I'll reiterate - the ROS2 release is going to split the community so that there are two distros of ROS eventually maintained. Industry backed/invested ROS2 (for the next 5~ years) and current Open Source ROS1. Users from current open source ROS1 won't move to ROS2 until industry paves way. So, we've got another ~5 years of ROS1 in my opinion.

The only people who benefit from seeing the amount of ROS2 users go up in this thread is Open Robotics/OSRF as it stands presently. I don't think anyone else is making a profit off of a ROS2 based system as of now. So until ROS2 features become mainstream this trend will continue. Of course, Open Robotics would never admit that they are not making profit off of ROS2. So with that reasoning I'm going to assume they are already making profit off of it (because they will always claim to be). BUT. I bet their revenues (not including funding/investments for ROS2) are mostly in ROS1 projects as of now. Actually I guarantee it and would bet money on it. 

So, that begs the question.... who's got skin in the game for ROS2?

The community as a whole will benefit by more people being in ROS2, but as it stands as of this date all of the vested interest is in Open Robotics/OSRF. IMHO that means Open Robotics should provide some resource allocation towards porting some robots/example systems so that others can follow in their footsteps. However now that Open Robotics is a for-profit business, it's a little bit contradictory that they should help their competitors out, don't ya think? :slight_smile: Another point validating the prediction that the ROS community is going to split for the next 5 years.

Is this good? Maybe. We do need a bridge/defined porting process to prevent this though. Surprised no one is being paid to think about this engineering problem out in the open source world. More proof that the only people actively moving to ROS2 are industry backed and are probably holding their solutions/cards to their chest. More proof that industry will only eventually open source their ROS2 solutions/implementations when it is no longer beneficial to competitors. (e.g in 3-5 years time).

That being said. If anyone out there is interested in publicly supporting an open source path forward for a ROS1->ROS2 transition, feel free to contact me :smiley: .......... one last thing.. OSRF ... how was a transition plan not designed for or planned for or accounted for?? BIG fail.





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