Original post here.
Hi, community!
The simulation team at Open Robotics is excited to announce a big change that’s coming up. We’ll be retiring the “Ignition” name in favor of the good old “Gazebo” brand that we all love.
We introduced the Ignition name seven years ago when we started work on major architectural changes in Gazebo. We used the Ignition name to differentiate the new approach from the Gazebo that had come before, which is now referred to as Gazebo Classic. Those changes have gone very well, thanks in no small part to contributions and support from our worldwide community of users and other stakeholders. The new system is now mature and proven in use (e.g., the DARPA SubT program), with LTS releases available on a regular schedule. In parallel, we have wound down work on Gazebo Classic, with Gazebo 11 being our last release in that line (supported through 2025).
We’re going to reclaim the Gazebo name to describe our new and ongoing work, and retire the Ignition name. We’re guessing that more than a few of you are happy to hear about this change, given the frequency with which we continue to get questions about when to use “Ignition” vs. “Gazebo” vs. “Ignition Gazebo” and what the differences are.
You may be wondering why we’re making the change now. The reason is that we have encountered a trademark obstacle regarding our use of the name “Ignition”. In the course of resolving that issue, we’re taking the opportunity to simplify things, for us and for you.
What’s changing?
So what’s happening in practice? In summary, each place where the name “Ignition” or “ign” is used will be converted to a Gazebo counterpart (“Gazebo” or “gz”). The Ignition logo will also be replaced by the Gazebo logo. Changes will be made in:
- Websites
- GitHub organizations and repositories
- Namespaces, command line tools, shared libraries, directories, APIs, files
- UIs
- Documentation
Timeline
As always, we strive to make the transition for users as painless as possible. That’s why we’ll be adopting a tick-tock deprecation strategy starting from the Garden release, wherever possible. That is:
- Garden: all names default to Gazebo, but aliases are available so users can keep using Ignition, with warnings.
- Future releases: the Ignition aliases will be eventually removed and users will need to use Gazebo.
- Past releases: Citadel and Fortress will continue to be supported according to their published schedules. Wherever possible, we’ll add aliases for Gazebo into those older releases such that new users of those versions can write modern code from the start and have an even easier migration to Garden and later.
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We’ll be updating this post as major milestones are complete. The full transition will be complete by the Garden release in September.
Gazebo Dev Team