I fully sympathise, having been part of an organisation trying to support (an) OSS project(s) while the appearance of much more resources being available made it very difficult to engage community members and find sufficient contributors.
What would perhaps help in this particular case is to clarify the current structure of the ROS 2 project: who is responsible for what, who are their employers, who is paying for what, which parts are now the sole responsibility of the OSS community, etc.
The number of times I’ve heard “yeah, but Google is now backing ROS 2, so Z” is almost innumerable.
For Z, choose one of:
- “ROS 2 is a commercial product now” (!)
- “resources are less of a problem” / “they have google-resources now” (whatever that means)
- “software standards and software quality will now quickly become much higher”
- “there is much more money compared to when it was a non-profit” (!)
- “it’s much more serious now as a project”
- “a company is now behind it” (?)
etc, etc
Clearly, it’s far from obvious what happened the past couple years after Intrinsic “acquired the for-profit part of OR”.
Many (all?) Intrinsic contributors still seem to use their old accounts (here, on Github, etc) and many package manifests still place them at openrobotics.org or one of the other old (non-profit) domains. Many of the (core) repositories are also still fully maintained by “old” accounts, who are the only ones with push or higher permissions. Getting a PR merged basically means interacting with “a core developer of ROS”, which are still the same accounts as always.
It’s apparently also far from clear what the future of the project is. It may be clear to some, but “the larger community” does not appear to understand it.
And I feel this in part is responsible for a lack of contributions: instead of it being clear ROS 2 is no longer maintained by a single organisation which somehow managed to find sufficient funds to develop new functionality, to pick up issues identified and to keep working on it – from WillowGarage times to now with a fully not-for-profit two-man foundation with some core maintainers – there is this pervading feeling everything will work out because that’s how it always worked with ROS.
(And then we get to complain when something doesn’t get fixed or implemented, which can only mean someone is purposefully ignoring the community for some reason … /s)
Have their been any updates from either Intrinsic or OSRF as to what will happen after the first two years where nothing will change for ROS, or who are now expected to do what? I don’t believe there have been, but I’m also not paying as much attention as I used to.
As a project, ROS got “bought by Google” (not what happened), then the people who controlled everything for so long communicated “nothing will change” (of course, also not true eventually) and now we’re surprised many still look to OSRF to organise everything, find resources for everything and keep the project running despite everything?
That was already a problem before the transition, and it is much more so now.
Edit: just to clarify: I’m genuinely worried here. If anything in this post comes across as sarcastic (with the exception of the /s there), is not assuming good faith or in general seems harsh, that was not my intent. I’m blaming my Dutch-ness.