qualcomm bought picknik. good or bad for hobby robotics?

by Kofi Xu

Saw in a September robotics recap that Qualcomm bought PickNik, the MoveIt people. Same month NVIDIA put out Isaac ROS 5.0 with agent features bolted on. The kids in my after-school robotics club learn arm planning on MoveIt because it's free and runs on whatever junk laptop we've got. So my first reaction was a wince. My worry is the usual one, big chip company owns the tool and in a couple of years the tutorials assume you bought their board. Second reaction, maybe it's fine? Someone has to pay the people who maintain it, and a well funded owner could mean better docs and fewer Saturdays lost to dependency hell. Anyone here actually building on ROS or MoveIt? Would you trust it more or less now. Honestly not sure which way this goes

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Comments

Fergus M. 1 week ago

not really a robotics person but this is exactly what happens with bike groupsets. big company buys the good small one, parts get dearer, then a couple of years later someone puts out an open alternative and it starts again. so maybe fine long term?? im on chapter 6 of a python book so take that with salt

Lucas Muller 1 week ago

Kofi, MoveIt has been in most of the arm prototypes I've worked on, so a couple of thoughts. The licence doesn't change retroactively. It's BSD, whatever exists today stays forkable and your club laptops keep working. What an owner changes is where the maintainers spend their hours. If the roadmap drifts toward one vendor's boards you'll see it in which issues get answered and which hardware gets tested first, long before anything closes. So I'd watch the boring signals for a year. Are outside PRs still merged at the same pace, do the tutorials still start on a plain Ubuntu machine. Fergus is right that the cycle repeats. I'd add that open forks in robotics usually come out of university labs, so if it goes badly a student project might be what saves you.

ines.v 1 week ago

the groupset comparison is weirdly accurate. the data logging software we use in school chemistry went the same way, free version still runs, just nobody updates it

Zara Haddad 1 week ago

same thing happens in architecture software all the time, every plugin our year actually likes gets bought and then the student licence quietly gets worse. but lucas's point about watching which hardware gets tested first is good, thats the bit you'd see coming. kofi does your club pin versions? we started freezing our whole setup at the start of each year after one update ate a week of my studio project and honestly it made the ownership stuff matter a lot less