OpenSplice 6.7 released under the Apache license

Hi,

given that PrismTech just released OpenSplice 6.7 [1][2] and that it’s now licensed as Apache 2.0, is there any chance that OpenSplice will make a comeback to the list of supported DDS implementations for ROS 2? It’d be great to have a more robust and stable opensource DDS implementation available for ROS 2.

Cheers.

1 - http://www.prismtech.com/dds-community/software-downloads
2 - https://github.com/PrismTech/opensplice

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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.

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That all sounds great.

Does this https://github.com/ros2/rmw_opensplice/pull/172 mean that rmw_opensplice_cpp will be in active development or just it’s fleshed out to get it to compile with OpenSplice 6.7 and no further improvements will be made?

Thank you William! Supporting the ROS community is our highest priority. In the next release we include also a new feature to setup the QoS through XML files. That will also help a lot to the ROS community to fine tune the middleware without recompiling the ROS2 code for specific cases such as low bandwidth, video streaming, etc.

We expect to officially release Fast RTPS 1.5 end of next week, but it is already in our github in an special branch as we finish the latest tests and QA.

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Good news this release of OpenSplice under Apache 2.0 License.

It is also very good news the efforts of the guys from eProsima to improve the performance with large messages. PointClouds are fundamental, especially now that many robots are equipped with RGB-D cameras, and this aspect was not completely solved. I’m sure Jaime and his team will do a good job on this matter. We recently did a project with FastRTPS and eProsima support was very good.

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