become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association — was formed.
and have fundamentally altered the way software is produced.
The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all U.S. auto manufacturers: Although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers. By the time the U.S. entered World War II, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money — or lawsuits.
Not too long ago, software was developed by hiring smart people, locking them in a room and sliding pizza under the door until the job was done. The open-source world has come about because everyone has become interconnected, resulting in more effective ways to produce, upgrade and maintain software.
Another example of early technological sharing came from DARPA. Researchers with access to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. This collaborative process of the 1960s led to the birth of the Internet in 1969. Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, a variety of phrases were used to describe the concept. Open source gained traction with the rise of the Internet and ease of global communication. With the advent of largescale participation, information has flowed freely everywhere, all the time. Collaborative software ecosystems have sprung up far and wide
systems for their control, sensory feedback and data processing. Robotics reaches across disciplines, including mechanical engineering, artificial intelligence, electronics and computer programming. Thus, robotics is a multidisciplinary branch of technology with reusable software providing the tools, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message passing, package management and more. Open-source robotics is topical not only because of the collaborative brainpower available via the Internet, but because of the prevalence of reinventing the wheel in university graduate programs and scholarly papers, which cartoonist Jorge Cham, a Ph.D. himself, captured so well in one of his comics, seen on this page.
Most major technology education centers teach the software and platforms available to them for free or by their computer suppliers, faculty, previous faculty and research partners. For example, Cartoon courtesy Jorge Cham. CLARAty, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon and University of Minnesota software Open source in robotics framework, came about because of Robotics involves the design, con- all of their collaborative efforts on struction, operation, structural dis- various NASA projects. position, manufacture and applicaAnother example is in Europe. In tion of robots — and also computer December 2000, motivated by more Mission Critical
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