I want to take this opportunity, at the final sync of the final distribution of ROS 1 from the Open Source Robotics Foundation, to thank, in no particular order except the first:
- @sloretz , for being the Noetic ROS Boss for five years. That’s a long time these days, and Shane has done an exemplerary job for that entire time - not to mention the many long months leading up to the initial release of Noetic, preparing and testing the release.
- All the other ROS Bosses over the years.
- The core group of ROS maintainers and contributors - you all know who you are - who built and maintained the software that became and was ROS Noetic Ninjemys for more than the last 5 years.
- Everyone who has contributed to ROS 1 throughout its lifetime, starting way back in 2007/2008ish at Willow Garage (and before, with the precursor to ROS at Stanford), and from there on through many, many organisations, including the Open Source Robotics Foundation and Open Source Robotics Corporation, but by no means limited to them.
- All the people behind the scenes who have helped make ROS possible as a project useful to so many, many people all over the world - and off it. That very long list includes the people who have built and maintained the infrastructure (a particular shout out to people who now make up the Infrastructure PMC at the OSRA, as well as those not on the PMC who have contributed to the infrastructure over the years, and the many folks from Ekumen who have fulfilled the tough buildfarmer role in recent years), the people who have given advice and feedback, the people who have provided necessary financial resources for all of the contributors and the infrastructure and everything else we need, and the people who have managed other people and resources to keep everything running smoothly. It’s often a thankless job with no (or undesirable) recognition, but none of this would be possible without you!
- The entire community, for using ROS to build so many amazing robots (products, research, or otherwise!) and teach so many new engineers robotics. Without the community, ROS would have gone nowhere.
ROS 1 has done amazing things since it first started as a tool to push every day robotics beyond the research lab. In a flashback to what the World Wide Web was like when ROS started:
Now it’s over to all of you in the community. If you still want or need to use ROS 1, for whatever reason, please head over to the ROS One project.