Dear all, I had a phone conversation with the EtherCAT Technology Group's president, Martin Rostan, this morning. To get an impression, you find him in this PodCast https://www.sps-magazin.de/podcasts/ (German). Mr Rostan sends his regards, expresses that he has a heart for all the mills and lathes in private cellars out there and for the enthusiasts behind them. However, the initial information I received was wrong. The ETG's statutes (Satzung in German) do not allow non-legal entities to become members. Bummer.
Mr Rostan refrained from giving us any legal advise. That would be their lawyers. But he took the freedom to point out that there are others who are already shipping EtherCAT drivers and have not experienced any legal problem at all - he just cannot make any promises of any sorts about the future, say if their company is bought. Most notably there is ROS and the idea is that we could learn from them. He knows that the important bit is that https://github.com/OpenEtherCATsociety/SOEM/blob/master/LICENSE is redistributed with the package. This effectively means that users they become aware of are requested to get that free membership and that does not change if LinuxCNC is a member or not. I propose that we look into what ROS has come up with. Otherwise, I do not know what this means for us, except to take care not to mix the EtherCAT codebase with the regular LinuxCNC. To avoid paperwork that would not make much practical difference for anyone, we were discouraged to register a newly formed society that could be a member. But there may be other sorts of motivation to have something that can hold money for LinuxCNC. User meetings come to mind, and then this organization could also become a member as a side-event. What now? Steffen _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
