Re: info on Open Robot Controller CAD : ORCCAD

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Daniel Simon wrote:

> However, we thought that it might be interesting to inform you about
> the existence of ORCCAD (Open Robot Controller CAD)

I am aware of the existence of ORCCAD for quite some years already,
and I do like it for many reasons. However, I decided not to mention
it on the web pages explicitly, because of its license: I'm quite sure
that the conditions on
<http://www.inrialpes.fr/iramr/pub/Orccad/conditions-eng.html>
are not compatible with open source licenses...
I guess this licensing issue is an internal, political INRIA problem,
because has a similar licensing issue and they have gone through a
re-formulation of their license (still not open source) some months
ago, if I recall correctly...

> As such, it seems complementary to what is proposed here, in the sense
> that it targets more the real-time and event-based aspects, controlling
> the continuous control tasks, rather than the latter themselves.

This is indeed complementary to the current Orocos scope, and
personally I would love to see contributions from the ORCCAD
developers. But, the license, you know...

Maybe a starting initiative for cooperation could be to brainstorm
extensively about the design and implementation issues of ORCCAD? This
would benefit both Orocos and ORCCAD, although we would require a
fresh and independent implementation...

By the way, who are the persons to talk to at INRIA and to convince to
release ORCCAD under an Open Source license? There are precedents
of supporting Open Source within INRIA, e.g. with the WWW developments
they've taken over from CERN, if I am not mistaken?

Thanks for your suggestions and interests! I hope we can reach some
cross-fertilization :-)

Herman

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