The OSRC Team is Joining Intrinsic and What it Means for the ROS Community

How will OSRF ensure the operation of the build farm, release process, websites, etc. in the short-term?
@ralph-lange

All of the community infrastructure is being retained by OSRF. The foundation has two contractors who have already been supporting the infrastructure who will continue to do so. In addition the OSRC team has time allocated for training and knowledge transfer to the OSRF team and will also be available to assist with any urgent issues.

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Will there be a path for organizations to be involved with OSRF to help guide/steer the community?
@mrpollo

Yes, absolutely! Organization support is important to the future of the OSRF. There will be more to come on this soon. If you are interested, please reach out to Brian, Vanessa and Geoff so we can discuss how your organization can contribute to the long-term future of open-source software for robotics.

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Is there a charter for OSRF? similar to the ROS 2 TSC
@mrpollo

OSRF has bylaws that govern its mission and day-to-day operations as a non-profit foundation, subject to the laws of the state of California. OSRF’s mission is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open-source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

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In the past, Open Robotics has offered consulting-style services to other organizations developing ROS applications. Will this continue to be part of the business model for either OSRF or OSRC/Intrinsic?
@shonigmann

OSRF is no longer going to be pursuing the consulting services business model. But the OSRC team at Intrinsic will continue to do so. If you’re interested, please reach out to Brian or contact the team at Intrinsic.

Can you please elaborate on Intrinsic’s plans on ROS?
@ralph-lange

The continued development of ROS core and therefore growing the ROS community is a key objective for Intrinsic. Like many robotics companies, Intrinsic already leverages valuable tools from the ROS ecosystem, like Gazebo. While these tools enabled us to start building our robotics software and AI platform quickly, we also started to feel some limitations when it came to productization. Instead of overcoming these challenges just for our own team, we see the value in helping solve some pain points more holistically for our future platform users and the entire robotics community. Hence, on the one hand we are using ROS and related projects like everybody else in the community. On the other hand, as part of our platform, we aim to provide a more hardened environment for enterprise use, which could make it easier to deploy ROS at scale.

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Will OSRC developers continue to contribute to the ROS “core”, or can we expect them to focus more at the application level on “Intrinsic’s near-term focus in industrial manufacturing”?
@shonigmann

Yes, they will continue to contribute. To set expectations, the OSRC team has always been pulled in multiple directions, with most developers doing core development and maintenance in a minority of their time, because of customer project obligations. We only expect improvement from that status quo: with this new arrangement we anticipate the number of simultaneous responsibilities to decrease and at the same time the allocation of dedicated time for core development will increase. At Intrinsic, the team will have access to new team members, resources, infrastructure and opportunities to collaborate and innovate across the Alphabet ecosystem. We expect a lot of contributions back to the community from work that’s already been scoped, and interesting new projects to come.

Intrinsic wants to see ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF be even more successful and for core libraries to be hardened for enterprise use and made easier to deploy at scale. To help achieve this they will support the OSRC team to continue doing what they have been so successful at so far. Intrinsic hopes to make it easier for roboticists to get from prototype to deployment, using the best of ROS and new tools. OSRF, not Intrinsic, will be responsible for directing the roadmap for ROS, Gazebo and Open-RMF Projects. The plan is for the OSRC team to continue supporting the projects in accordance with that roadmap: writing features, fixing issues, merging pull requests, releasing packages and distros, and generally making the projects “go” day to day.

Is there a defined transition phase in which the former Open Robotics developers continue working directly on ROS in the known mode before the acquisition?
@ralph-lange

Prior to the acquisition, developers at OSRC split their time contributing to core repositories and servicing commercial projects. The status quo is not fundamentally changing, the OSRC team at Intrinsic will continue to service some existing commercial contracts. However, the team will have more time and resources to devote to core projects than they did before. Expect to see your favorite GitHub user handles just as often in the coming months!

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What does this mean for non-Open Robotics core maintainers and committers, in the short term and the long term?
@christophebedard

In the short term, nothing will change for all existing core maintainers and committers. The projects will keep operating using the same processes as they have to date.

In the longer term, we expect the OSRF to put in place a more formal process for managing who becomes a maintainer and who has commit rights to core repositories. Through this process, maintainers and committers will become more broadly sourced and the projects will become more sustainable, with a diverse foundation of maintainers and committers spread across a variety of organizations, including individual contributors.

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What will be the relationship between Intrinsic and OSRF?
@mrpollo

OSRF is independent of Intrinsic. In the same way other companies and members of the community contribute to ROS and work with OSRF, Intrinsic will do so as well. As an Intrinsic employee, Brian Gerkey will keep a board seat at the OSRF. In the near-term, Intrinsic will be working closely with OSRF as OSRF transitions operational tasks and its governance model. Intrinsic is becoming a major contributor to OSRF’s projects due to its contribution of efforts from the OSRC team at Intrinsic. OSRF remains an independent non-profit welcoming significant resources and support from Intrinsic.

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Will we see a lot more “copyright intrinsic” in new code for the core project?
@v4hn

Yes, you can expect that as the OSRC team at Intrinsic makes contributions that those contributions will be copyrighted by Intrinsic. This is just the same as seeing code copyrighted by Apex.AI, TRI, Sony, Willow Garage, and many, many other organization contributors to ROS.

This ultimately has little impact on the open source nature of the code or on the license that allows you to use it. All contributions to ROS code are licensed using the same license as the rest of the code in that package (for ROS 2 this is typically the Apache License 2.0). While Intrinsic, as the copyright holder of its contributions, is free to do with those contributions as they see fit, as soon as they are released using the open source license the community is also free to use them in accordance with the license terms.

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Will you work on stability of existing features over adding new features? Will you focus on features that are of interest to Intrinsic over features of general community interest?

@v4hn

First, we would like to acknowledge that balancing stability and new features is a struggle for development teams. Currently the OSRC team at Intrinsic is focused on minimizing disruption to the development cycle and roadmap. Of course the broader community–from large corporations to bug-fixing students–have features that they want implemented. As with any organization that contributes to open source software, Intrinsic has an interest in seeing features it wants or needs added to ROS as a priority. This does not mean that any features Intrinsic is not interested in will be ignored or abandoned. As core contributors, committers and maintainers, the OSRC team at Intrinsic will continue to ensure contributors have a fair chance of seeing their feature or fix being merged into the source code. The tension inherent in open collaboration is that sometimes opinions differ around what should be implemented and when. Intrinsic is supportive of the OSRF updating the project governance and management model to promote greater visibility and participation by the community. OSRF and Intrinsic both want a future where Intrinsic is just one of a large group of contributors.

In the mid- and long-term, Intrinsic is interested in seeing ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF become even more useful for in-production, for-sale robots in the same way that the Linux kernel is useful for in-production, for-sale devices from televisions to mission-critical servers. This naturally leads to an interest in stability of the core software and features. However, Intrinsic also wants to see the software grow in usefulness and applicability. The OSRC team at Intrinsic will work on both making the existing features more stable and reliable as well as adding new features that benefit both Intrinsic and the community.

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Question: Might we see a closed ROS2(Pro) intrinsic version at some point with software-based selling points that will not be part of the community version and will fragment the community?
@v4hn @ssarkar

Since its original inception ROS has been envisioned to be an ecosystem which commercial companies can build products on and participate in. We have carefully curated the core to make sure that the components are all commercially usable with liberal licenses. Originally we used the BSD 3-Clause by default and now we use the Apache 2.0 license. In addition, we strongly recommend others follow our lead and also use similar liberal licenses for their contributions. The explicit purpose of this is that companies can use and integrate these elements into commercial products. The companies that integrate ROS into their products are not required to contribute their code back to the community, but by just participating in the community they are providing value. And most companies learn, sometimes slowly, that engaging and contributing back to the open source community can help them improve their commercial product in future releases.

While it is still too early to provide more details about Intrinsic’s robotics software and AI platform, we can clearly address the concerns regarding our plans with respect to ROS. Intrinsic overall and in particular the OSRC team joining us will continue to contribute improvements to the well known public repositories. We strongly believe that investing into the open source ROS ecosystem is not only the right thing to do, but also the best business decision. We plan to actively contribute to core development improving the open source products, instead of creating fragmentation which we know will damage the community. At the same time, Intrinsic is also developing proprietary software as part of our forthcoming platform. These parts will integrate with the released open source products providing additional capabilities, infrastructure and tooling for the ROS ecosystem.

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In the IEEE Spectrum interview Intrinsic and OSRC mentioned a “more industrialized platform”. Can you please explain what you mean by this and how it relates to the ROS community?
@doganulus

Intrinsic is not yet ready to share details about its planned software products. Fully independent of ROS and this acquisition, Intrinsic will share more about its platform in 2023.
A “more industrialized platform” refers on the one hand to extended quality assurance and support levels. On the other hand to additional functionality, infrastructure and tooling around the core ROS framework.
For the ROS community, this means continued and strengthened support for the development and maintenance of ROS open source code by Intrinsic as well as complementary commercial offerings.

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