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Comment by daralthus | Hacker News Reader

what's the current recommendation instead of ROS?

There's a few alternatives. Zenoh [1] is an up-and-coming distributed middleware. ROS2 is actually adding it as an alternative to DDS [2].

LCM [3] is another middleware that has been around for a while.

[1]: https://zenoh.io/

[2]: https://newsroom.eclipse.org/eclipse-newsletter/2023/october...

[3]: https://lcm-proj.github.io/lcm/

Those aren't really ROS alternatives though, as they seem to offer just the message passing layer, which is one of the best features of ROS, but it's not really enough in isolation from the other good features.

People forget that ROS isn't really about the IPC or the build system or the networking.

Ok it is about those things, but fundamentally it's about standardization. Grab any lidar driver and it'll output a LaserScan. Every wheeled robot will send out Odometry, anything from a submarine to a flying drone to an agv will respond to a Twist message, every robot will have a central coordinate frame called "base_link", etc.

The cross ecosystem interoperability is frankly insane and the main perk of it all. It makes building things easy when you don't have to deal with writing adapters every single damn time. This is why ROS 2 is currently such a step backwards because it fragments the ecosystem in DDS compatibility, making sure that no two packages will necessarily be able to run concurrently.

ROS is one of those "frameworks" that's so awful and pervasive that for teams of more than 2 people handrolling your own networking is almost always going to be better than trying to make ROS work.

Viam seems promising, especially for cloud connected stuff.

Any framework that has "Start for free" and "Contact sales" on the home page is gonna do really great at mass developer adoption. Can't wait for them to rugpull everyone and close source all of their code when the VCs want to get paid.

Indeed. In the robotics space, this just happened with foxglove studio. Six months ago, I considered advocating that we switch our bespoke visualizer to be a bunch of foxglove plugins instead. Today, it's clear that would have been a terrible move.

Quite right. Corporate open source is always one step away from straight up trapping people through sunk cost. Sometimes a change in management is all that needs to happen.

At least Vizanti will always stay open ;)

Wait what has Foxglove done?

foxglove-studio is no longer open source

https://foxglove.dev/blog/foxglove-2-0-unifying-robotics-obs...

BMW research has the most promising fork I have seen yet

https://github.com/bmw-software-engineering/Foxbox

The founder is the same person who made MongoDB, which is still source available, SSPL notwithstanding.

Point taken though.

that's probably the most notorious example of a company abandoning open source and switching to a proprietary license, so that is a strong reason to believe that viam will rugpull if given the chance

I know this is just reopening a discussion that HN has had a million times, but what mongo (and elastic, and so on) swapped to is not IMO a rugpull to anyone except those who were reselling those specific open source projects. Anyone using those tools internally/as a backend weren't affected by that, whether they were a hobbyist or small business. The exception being people who only want true FOSS for ideological reasons.

The trouble with the SSPL is that it also nerd-snipes people who think the legal system works like code. Example of such a person: https://ssplisbad.com/

As far as I can tell reading the license, the key terms of the SSPL hinges on "such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available". If you make something available that is then able to be run, then you've fulfilled the license.

Looking at it again the page I linked above actually goes beyond overly-strict interpretation into actual bad-faith reading. When talking about what you have to publish, they cut off the sentence short so that they can interpret it mean things like the BIOS or IDE, but reading the actual license text it's clear that's not the case. "All programs that you use to make the Program or modified version" vs "all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available"

As someone who only runs FOSS in my day-to-day, and not anything with SSPL, I'm really annoyed that that page nerd-sniped me into defending the SSPL.

the main trouble with the sspl is that it isn't an open-source license, which is a problem for people who only want true foss for practical reasons, not just ideological reasons. reselling is one of the rights that an open-source license protects, and historically speaking, everyone having that right has been absolutely critical to the development of things like linux, gcc, x-windows, ffmpeg, emacs, postgres, and wikipedia; without it, not only wouldn't we have objective-c support (contributed by next against their will) or linux distributions (like slackware, red hat, debian, and especially ubuntu), we also wouldn't have wikipedia quotes in google serps, or android

a secondary problem with it is that, as you point out, the sspl is so vague that you can never be sure that you're in compliance with it, and it's never been litigated, so there's no precedent

it sounds like you have a pretty weak grasp both of how the legal system works and of the history of free software licensing. actual bad-faith reading is literally the job description of a lawyer

Bad-faith readings are the job of a lawyer, but what I pointed out goes beyond a bad-faith reading. It's a literal lie, made by truncating a sentence. If you were to say "Nazis are the greatest evil the world has seen", and a lawyer in court quoted you as saying "Nazis are the greatest", that's not a lawyer's standard bad faith reading.

If you think the above would be legally permissible then I'm afraid you're incorrect regarding which of us has a "pretty weak grasp of how the legal system works".

I do agree with your first two paragraphs.

i agree with your nazi example, but it's not clear to me in context that this is such an example

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