New LinuxCNC-Ethercat git tree

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.