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

[Nikolaus Demmel]

[quote="bgmoon, post:37, topic:6155"]

FWI, I cant speak for other commercial companies, but if we do what we think we are going todo, we are likely to spend about $1B on robot software development over the next 10 years. $0 will go to ROS1. Much of it is likely to go towards ROS2 functionality. Thats not immoral, its just good business. We dont see ROS1 as a commercially viable technology base, at least not for our markets (which are personal defense and security robots.)

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One aspect that is lacking from this analysis IMHO is that the value of ROS2 is also dependent on its community (one of reasons for success of ROS1 IMHO). Bigger community often doesn't just mean more community packages, but also more contributions to the core, more developers (potential hires) that are familiar with the ecosystem and want to work with these tools, attracting in turn more businesses. So if you want to benefit from ROS2, it is probably in your economical interest to have a strong ROS2 community, and one way to help this is ensuring that there is no hard split in the overall ROS community. This means that at least IMHO it is in your economical interest to ensure a transition that is as smooth as possible, which can only happen with $ spent on ROS1.



Of course I can appreciate that it is often easier to argue funding "missing ROS2 feature X" at a company than to argue "funding ease of transition ROS1 > ROS2" if you don't happen to be a company with a ROS1 code base, but that doesn't mean there is no economical reason to still do it. If you fund ROS1 that way, you are not just funding "commercially inviable technology", you are (hopefully) funding the future ROS2 community.



With the same argument I think it is it absolutely legitimate for OSRF to "redirect" ROS2 funds to support ROS1 (from the discussion I take it that most people agree).











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