Hello again,
On 28.02.22 14:28, andy pugh wrote:
On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 at 13:22, Steffen Möller <steffen_moel...@gmx.de> wrote:
Personally I know nothing about EtherCAT. I have always been a little
afraid of the licensing complexities mentioned here:
https://etherlab.org/en/ethercat/
Etherlab itself is GPLv2, but _using_ it seems to bring a different
licensing restriction into play. And I don't know enough about
licensing to know if that's a problem.
I called them up - first the Beckhoff group (they have nice stuff on
https://www.beckhoff.com/en-gb/) and from there I was pointed to the EtherCAT Technology
Group (https://www.ethercat.org/de/contact.html), so I called them, too. Without that
membership we would be in said uncharacterized unmitigated license trouble that Andy
referenced but with that membership they would be very sweet to us. From what I
understand, they try to be good people and just in case someone messes something up they
do not want to guess how to reach out. So we are asked to become a member of the EtherCAT
Technology Group (ETG) - for which we would identify someone who would serve as a
communicator between them and our community and write a "3-line email" with our
request to integrate an EtherCAT driver that is available at some URL with LinuxCNC as
described on https://linuxcnc.org.
I do not see that Debian would become a member of their Technology Group. And
it would not make too much sense to me to have any extra outreach from Debian
to that ETG, but we can ask for an OK to have that distribution channel and
also ask for Fedora at the same time.
Now - big question: Is there an agreement that it would be beneficial for
LinuxCNC to become a member of the ETG? It is free. And there likely a series
of perks for training material that may not be of our immediate concern. They
invited me to help with that initial contact but that LinuxCNC-representative
to them could then be anyone we pick. Andy? Rod? You both? Jeff? All three of
yours?
Best,
Steffen
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