[woumn]

So, I worked with ROS over the summer at my internship. If I could ask, what did your closed-source version improve on?

In my experience, one of my worst experiences with ROS was maintaining environments and python versions as well as the build system.

[jvanderbot]

A whole bunch of things! I won't bore you, but you can imagine the pain points a team must have solved to deploy it for real:

ROSCORE: a single point of failure. This immediately has a bunch of negative implications on prototyping small nodes and scaling to large systems.

No concept of vehicles, sensors, resources to interact with, and so on. You have to look up what topic to subscribe to, deal with their ad-hoc message types, etc just to connect to a process managing a part of a vehicle / robot.

No semi-persistent data storage is built in, meaning you need separate databases, intra-process shared memory, etc.

Zero multi-agent awareness. You'd have to solve a bunch of problems like adding / disconnecting robots from whomever is running roscore (we don't have one!).

Abysmal command and data routing, and no sub-structures that make it easy to verify commands, ensure the right nodes are in charge, display statuses, discover what nodes are running on a system and how to command them, and so on.

And convenience stuff, like ROS has no command editor for easily scripting a vehicle's actions, without need for programming (though you can program all you want).

And no legacy. We have access to some tried-and-true code-bases here to incorporate.