RIOT for Application or Research?

Hi RIOT Folk As a long standing Contiki user (deploying the os on several self-designed and manufactured ARM boards), who is somewhat frustrated by the apparent continuing emphasis on research and development over application, I am wondering where RIOT stands in that regard? Although there is a clear statement 'out of the box usage in industry, research, and private environments', what does that really mean? For example can we expect a release strategy that includes stable versions suitable for industrial deployment? Perhaps a 'users' in addition to a 'developers' forum, particularly for those that wish to minimise getting 'into the box'. You'll appreciate that my interest is in the potential of eventually migrating from Contiki to RIOT. Best wishes, Ron.

Dear Ron,

you were right with your perception that we, as the RIOT community, are targeting both, research _and_ industry. Yet we are, in comparison to Contiki, a rather young effort, but with a strong and fast-growing community, improving and stabilizing the code at high speed.

Actually, we are about to get a new release out that provides vast improvements to the network stack, hardware abstraction and consolidation, and general system architecture and stability. Once this release has proven to fulfill our demands in terms of stability and robustness, we will switch to stable+development branch model, ensuring that the stable branch will be suitable for industrial deployment.

Cheers, Oleg

Hi Oleg

That seems like a very positive response, particularly your goal of 'industrial' application.

Can I make a couple of hopefully relevant observations from Contiki experience in particular. - A decent, detailed user manual and well documented code is much of what seems to separate research from commercial quality open-source software. - Similarly an up-to-date, prioritised road map with some kind of time scale. - Also details of contents of releases. Apart from core releases it would be extremely helpful to be able to understand the release status of each platform, perhaps a standard system to be used by platform developers.

Difficult I realise with volunteer effort.

So will keep following and at some stage hopefully will be in a position to contribute.

Best wishes

Ron