It is great that they finally released a new version as open source, and even better that they switched to Apache 2.0. However, they’re still just dumping their releases to GitHub, and they’re already one version behind (6.8 is already out for non-OpenSource). This doesn’t make external contributions very easy. Perhaps if the relationship between PrismTech and everyone working on ROS 2 becomes more mature (meaning more frequent open source releases, some notion of when releases will be made, and taking external contributions) then I would advocate for picking OpenSplice up again as an official middleware implementation. Until then I think the consensus (we at OSRF talked about this a few days ago) ought to keep the list lean with Fast-RTPS and Connext, because, as I don’t have to tell you, maintaining a middleware implementation is a lot of work.
I’ll also take a moment to blatantly brag on Fast-RTPS, because the guys at eProsima have been working with us really well lately (taking pull requests, answering questions, focusing development based on our feedback, etc…), and have been making lots of improvements. In the upcoming version they’re implementing piggybacked heartbeat which should resolve a lot of the large message performance issues. So, at least lately, I’ve not been missing OpenSplice as much as when we first switched to Fast-RTPS.
That all being said, OpenSplice might be a better alternative for some people.
So, if people in the community want to pick it up, I for one will try to help by answering questions and taking contributions to make it happen.