New LinuxCNC-Ethercat git tree

One note--lcec_generic has a test that floats aren't larger than 32 bits. I've disabled that if we're using a double, but there's a chance that something under the hood will break. Again, testing.

It'd be kind of nice to have an EtherCAT test slave that runs on a Raspberry Pi (or similar) that we could use for testing this sort of thing. Then I could work it into my usual testing process.

In my view its pointless doing PR's if they dont feed into the etherlabmaster repos.

It finally came back to me
Bjarne Van Horn from igh (eg etherlabmaster)  forked Sasha's repo for me and cleaned it up so I could publish it in a repo at packagecloud.io as part of my project bulding the 2.9.x installers. I retired my repository when it went to therlabmaster.
He also contributed some code to my linuxcnc-live-build repo around ethercat repos

His repo is here
github.com/ighvh/linuxcnc-ethercat 
It would be good to put him in the loop about your PR's maybe raise an issue there.
We want people to be able to install linuxcnc, from our ISO's and then simply install the ethercat environment without building code.

 

I guess it needs both. I too have made little changes to the source as to fix problematic devices and add Delta ASDA3 series drives. Not a big deal, but the community would be better off having a living repo that processes PRs. Thank you @scottlaird!.

I don't want to deny the usefulness of having packages but I do not think that this is the underlying key problem. How about doing releases in the new repo and taking those into build packages via etherlab?

I did email Bjarne and asked him to check this thread out and advise.

Unfortunately due to licensing restrictions we can't distribute the ethercat driver but with every thing in the repos now we don't have to.
 

If I understand things right, openSuse just makes a package of sittner's repo? They don't take ownership of development?
And I looked at IGH but lcec was nowhere to be found. Could have missed it though.

This is going off topic a bit, but I've heard "licensing restrictions" around this before, and I'm rather hazy on *which* licensing restrictions people are talking about. From a code perspective linuxcnc-ethercat is GPL v2 and the Ethercat library we use is LGPL-2.1. LinuxCNC itself is GPL v2 (or at least that's what Github thinks), so the code itself should be clear. There aren't any CLAs in place for any of this, so there's probably a chance that someone, somewhere, could claim ownership of some of it for historical reasons, but that's true of almost anything and not a big risk IMO.

@sittner made a comment about EtherCAT itself not being open-source, but IIRC that's not really a thing that should matter here, although of course you'd want your lawyer to sign off on that. I doubt more than a tiny handful of the hardware that LinuxCNC supports is open source anyway, or has explicit licensing allowing our use. Anyway, I'd expect that using the EtherCAT spec to implement devices would (a) be fine (at least in the US) given en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc. and (b) it'd sell more EtherCAT hardware.

In the medium term, though, it's a lot easier to maintain EtherCAT code outside of the LinuxCNC tree anyway.

As I understand it, openSuse is just hosting the build system, about the same way that Microsoft hosts Github. According to Rod above, it's pulling from github.com/ighvh/linuxcnc-ethercat, which is a fork of the original repo from ~7 months ago with no extra changes.

I'd love to see that move to pulling from github.com/linuxcnc-ethercat/linuxcnc-ethercat instead, and would be willing to do whatever is useful to help make it happen.

Also: EtherCAT is part of IEC 61158, alongside CAN, PROFIBUS, and parts of Modbus.

The EtherCAT FAQ has a section on Open Source (www.ethercat.org/en/faq.html#790); they say that EtherCAT itself is not open source (few standards are, that's fine), and that access to EtherCAT is available to everyone on non-discriminatory terms and that Master licenses are free of royalties. For further questions, they refer people to ETG and/or Beckhoff.

So if we ever get to this point, attempting to get some sort of "fine, just don't bother us" notice from Beckhoff is probably sufficient. But again, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't speak for LinuxCNC.

The licensing issue is that to sell ethercat machines you must register as a member of the Ethercat Technology Group and you need to be a registered company. Their income comes from royalties from royalties on the ethercat chips so its not an issue for a user of a machine.
Linuxcnc is  a community, not a company so it can't join so we can't distribute ethercat type technology. iGh on the other hand is a company so can do what they are doing.

This has been discussed with Marten Rosten the boss of the ETG by some German members and myself  when he was in Australia.

With the advances with all of the repositories, it is a perfect soluution and does not clutter the users PC if he is not using ethercat. 

Hey folks, this is Bjarne from IgH . Rod pointed me at this discussion.
So, I'm happy with replacing the repository in our OpenSuSE Build Service (OBS) Repository. I think we should automate the deployment. I opened an issue at GitHub to discuss the details.

I'd like to point out that in our OBS repository, we use the upstreamed linuxcnc packages to build linuxcnc-ethercat. OBS does not offer to include external repositories, like the linuxcnc repo. But installing the EtherCAT master and the library works nevertheless.

Regarding the licensing issue: EtherCAT is, afaik, a registered trademark of Beckhoff. So, if you want to use the name "EtherCAT", you have to have a permission from Beckhoff. This applies especially if you want to distribute an EtherCAT master, like we at IgH do. But there is an employee of Beckhoff who has contributed GPLv2+ code to the IgH master, so we at IgH feel confident in distributing the master as GPL'ed code.

Cheers, Bjarne