Feedback from emworld and future plans (partnerships AND licensing)

Development archive
1

Hi devs,

you have read that many of you are currently at embedded world meeting with representatives and "unbrella" corps. I did not understand the future plans for the RIOT-OS yet. Its not even clear to me why and for what in details RIOT needs business support. I mean we all have freedom incl the final freedom to fork etc and therefore the plans of RIOT are imortant for me but not essential. Maybe someone can answer me the follwing list of questions:

- RIOT is an OS that is mostly powered by the community with alot of students of european universities(?) -If RIOT is an open source Project why would it require "legal services" and "promise promition", matchmaking?? - Why is RIOT searching for partnerships is it only about money? - and for what is that money exatly needed? - Why are Business Partnerships needed? - the business gets a free OS and saves tons of development months, with GPL that "can" give someone back - or simply hide the GPL code - even if they do not hide it its more a moral problem because if you get sued - "by who?", and how mutch will it cost? (even in the times of gpl-violations.org almost nothing happend) (sorry but thats exatly what happend with this "applicance like systems" starting +15y ago.

I asked this questions to "understand the big picture" - and it can be quite different to my idea :

A strong, minimal and open IOT OS - that does NOT need promotion or partnerships - yeah be a partner its called GPL join the code. I want "people" and "corps" to join simply for selfish reasons - to get a better OS that I am currently working with and supporting code too. A selflish but fair win-win of plain simple gpl.

Q: I dont want to start a "a deep philosophical" discussion - But what EXACLTY is RIOT searching for? - any I am not talking about these beatifull business buzzwords. How mutch money is needed and for what "sections" (I just dont see it - dont need exact numbers).

Q: Do we need promotion at all?

Q: I am straight spitter: I have heard that RIOT will have a "full time worker/developer" hired - or was already hired - Where does the money for the salery of this person comes from?

Greets Jan

2

Hi Jan,

that’s a lot of questions :wink: Long story short, the way I see it:

  • RIOT was initially developed by manpower funded by FU Berlin, INRIA, HAW
  • nowadays, most core maintainers are still affiliated to these institutions (though there is a tendency towards more maintainers with other affiliations, which is great)
  • FU Berlin, INRIA and HAW might not be able to sustain their current level of financial engagement (funding RIOT maintainers)
  • even if FU Berlin, INRIA and HAW are able to sustain their current level of financial engagement, the community grows, and more maintainers are needed
  • experience shows that it is difficult to rely only on people that do this on their “free time”, especially when the community is as young as ours (e.g., compare to Linux at its beginning)

Therefore, the goals below are important: 1 - make sure there is nothing fundamental blocking our way towards accommodating a new wave of people that are paid to develop/maintain RIOT 2 - look for opportunities to work more closely with more companies/organizations that can (directly or indirectly) provide such manpower

The license discussion relates to point 1. Getting legal advice from an organization such as FSF or Eclipse Foundation also relates to point 1. Opportunities for “matchmaking” with other communities and/or companies relates to point 2.

Is the big picture clearer fo you?

Best,

Emmanuel

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    Is the big picture clearer fo you?

yes kind of. but can you please tell my what this fincancial engagement is used for? - who is defined as maintainer? (dont get me wrong I dont care about any fincial balances - I will never want a single dime - my work for this project is unpayable) - I dont know what kind of costs ther are etc. GIT, MAIL, what else?

thanks for your answers!

I will not thinking about RIOT licenses, foundations, companies anymore - and just keep coding :slight_smile: (so no further questions or ideas - I am wasting coding time :slight_smile: - I abandon your (riot-core) plans and decisions. dont sell your soul.

greets jan

4

Hi,

     Is the big picture clearer fo you? >

yes kind of. but can you please tell my what this fincancial engagement is used for? - who is defined as maintainer?

RIOT is legally fully independent and will stay so.

We're setting up a Verein in order to (among other things) get the stuff that's now mostly done by universities (printing t-shirts & stickers, being the "communication entry point", providing servers, paying the drinks at community meetings) into a defined independence.

That Verein will have statues to keep RIOT independant and free and everyone will be able to join, taking part of that Verein's decision making processes.

That said - most of us are not free from the need to get paid by someone, and many would like to work on RIOT on some kind of salary. We're trying to find a way to make that possible without selling our souls.

I agree with you - this stuff costs coding time. :wink:

Kaspar

5

Hi,

because you asked and to give a more encompassing picture:

- RIOT is an OS that is mostly powered by the community with alot of students of european universities(?)

This has been the case but is changing as RIOT is on the brink of being robust, stable and feature-rich enough for instant product development. There are several companies visibly investing time (in this case equalling money) in RIOT already, and there are several companies actively evaluating RIOT for fitness for their products.

- Why is RIOT searching for partnerships is it only about money? - and for what is that money exatly needed? - Why are Business Partnerships needed? - the business gets a free OS and saves tons of development months,

In order to achieve our goal of making the IoT a better place TM, we want products to be based on RIOT. RIOT can only maintain its current speed of development if people continue to put work into it. If RIOT stops improving, there will be no products based on RIOT and our vision of the IoT might not come to life. We believe that individuals hacking on RIOT in their spare time is not enough to make this happen. Contributions from universities and other research institutions can not be relied upon for financing.

What we are looking for is enterprises willing to invest in the development of RIOT in tune with our vision. What that means in detail (in-house developers, consulting, shared financing of maintainers ...) is not important. The important thing is that companies need to dedicate resources.

It's really quite analogues to Linux kernel development. Ideally, hardware vendors contribute code for their architectures, platforms, devices etc so that others will use those to realize products, and product developers contribute whatever they need as a software basis for their applications so that development and maintenance costs can be shared.

Q: I am straight spitter: I have heard that RIOT will have a "full time worker/developer" hired - or was already hired - Where does the money for the salery of this person comes from?

I was hired by airfy as a regular in-house software developer. This means I will not be working as a full time RIOT maintainer. However, as you can already read in the OTA thread, airfy is planning to contribute in the development efforts of RIOT.

Cheers, Ludwig

6

Hi Jan!

In addition to the other replies:

- RIOT is an OS that is mostly powered by the community with alot of students of european universities(?)

That's only half the truth: a big portion of the contributions to RIOT actually came from people paid by universities or research institutes (as research assistants or student assistant. So, yes, RIOT is powered by students - but one needs money to pay some of them to enable the current progress of development.

Cheers, Oleg