On 01.03.22 10:59, Les Newell wrote:
So once you've bought the controller, there is no other restriction.
As far as I can tell from their docs, that is the case. It's a pretty
sound business model.
I assume that royalty is 2x per axis, once for each end of the cable.
From what I can tell, it would be one royalty per axis. Daisy chaining
is part of the hardware spec.
The industry pays such patent taxes to microsoft/google/... about
everywhere. I am relaxed about that since all we want to have is an open
source access to use these devices. Here an idea for the three lines,
now asking for membership as the operational action to allow us to
redistribute whatever Open Source drivers there are through whatever
channel. I am starting with an introduction since my two contacts did
not know who we are and it is somewhat polite :)
I started some text on
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LFtgxDwE2tQRFjFGu_AAlBCuqBEoW6CaXoSWiaJrFkM/edit?usp=sharing
. Send me an email address that Google is allowed to see for direct
editing (only comments via the link). Here what I came up with so far:
*
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, [their office is in Germany, I prefer
this over Dear Madam/SIr or To whom this may concern, but direct me]
We contact you in the name of the LinuxCNC community to investigate how
we could integrate public EtherCAT drivers with our software
infrastructure. We are a 20+ years Open Source project to control CNC
machines that has found frequent adoptions also to control a diverse set
of robots up to 9 axes. LinuxCNC interprets G-code and some like to
program their hardware directly with it. Please find use cases and our
documentation on https://linuxcnc.org <https://linuxcnc.org>or YouTube.
Since Open Source, and with a nice hardware abstraction layer, LinuxCNC
is commonly used by enthusiasts with access to machines from the late
1900s to retrofit these with modern technology. And others take modern
parts home to explain their dayjob to their kids or to edutain
themselves as a hobby. That spirit prevails to bring LinuxCNC to
whatever is existing, and extend LinuxCNC when it encounters something new.
A few days ago, LinuxCNC became a regular package of Debian Linux and
will soon also be on Ubuntu. Works on Fedora (the free companion to
RedHat) are on their way. No hardware projects are performed within
LinuxCNC, but we would like to be complete when it comes to software
compatibility, just like you expect Linux to run everywhere. Upstream we
look at CAD/CAM, and downstream, it is the communication from the Linux
machine to the servos and steppers, that is you.
We understand that EtherCAT has a “GPL-2 if you OKed it and make us an
ETG-member”-license, which we do not understand and did not find more
information about. As a community, we decided not to preoccupy ourselves
with the legal details, we are all techies after all, if you could give
us such a membership-carte-blanche to create, modify and redistribute
EtherCAT drivers directly via our website and/or via Linux Distributions
(Fedora, Debian, OpenSuSE and its derivative distributions). All our
developments/modifications will be Open Source and once available via
regular Linux distributions this will lower the setup costs for your
existing and new members.
We have a technical coordinator of this effort with access to a series
of EtherCAT devices<Rod>
and these developers who feel associated with the project
<dev_1>, … , <dev_n>
who agreed that you may contact them. If there are other members in the
ETG with an interest in combining LinuxCNC with EtherCAT then we would
very much like to get in touch with them.
*
*Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration*
*Rod in the name of the LinuxCNC community
*
*
*
*My personal anchors to the community are Seb, Jeff and Andy. I suggest
that Rod sends whatever we come up with (if we come up with anything)
directly, but I would like to first have a positive vote by one of them
and "don't care"s or better from them and everyone else here on the list.*
*Best,
Steffen
*
*
*
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