We have successfully completed migration of our ROS (ros.sourceforge.net) and "Personal Robots" (personalrobots.sourceforge.net) code from SourceForge to code.ros.org. Both projects remain available under the same open source licenses as before and use the SourceForge-inspired GForge platform, but they are now hosted on dedicated servers.
As part of this move, we took the opportunity to split personalrobots into two new projects: ros-pkg and wg-ros-pkg. ros-pkg contains software for a general robotics platform and has contributions from many external collaborators. From navigation to drivers to visualizations, this software runs on a variety of robots and enables researchers to focus on cutting-edge capabilities. wg-ros-pkg builds on top of ros-pkg to provide the software for the PR2 robot platform. We hope that the PR2 platform will accelerate collaboration between researchers by providing both common software and hardware. In addition to ros-pkg and wg-ros-pkg, we encourage you to checkout the many other repositories of open source ROS code available from other institutions.
You may be wondering why we chose to move from SourceForge. We were stunned to discover that the Personal Robots project was consistently ranking either #1 or #2 in daily SVN activity, out of more than 230,000 projects hosted at SourceForge. The ROS project was also highly ranked, often in the top 20. This heavy use was putting strain on SourceForge's infrastructure and it was unfair to expect an external organization to support such heavy use. We are grateful to SourceForge for the support they have provided, as well as the tools we have needed to foster the ROS community. Now that we have launched ROS.org, it was time to for us to support the community using our own infrastructure.
The pace of activity with ROS software has increased these past several weeks, which reflects our progress towards completing Milestone 3. We have done initial releases of nearly all the software we expect to deploy with the PR2 robot. We have launched ROS.org as a new home for documentation, tutorials, and news about ROS. And now we have launched code.ros.org, which will strengthen the infrastructure used to share code. There's still much more to do, from hardening the software to improving documentation. We will also need tools to bring all the pieces together with new tools for installing and managing these platforms. We looking forward to sharing more with you as these become ready.
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