Because it's mentioned in the article, credit where credit is due to Willow Labs for their incredible work in pushing the open source side of the field forward.

Because it's mentioned in the article, credit where credit is due to Willow Labs for their incredible work in pushing the open source side of the field forward. http://www.ros.org/about-ros/ http://www.ros.org/about-ros/ Because of the nature of economics (vendors are either selling parts or complete systems), no one had incentive to work on a reusable OS / framework. This meant every lab project and product would start from scratch and rewrite the same stuff. From seeing this at a research lab ~2011, it absolutely impeded progress. Grad students shouldn't have had to repeatedly reimplement all the utility bits just to test their ideas on a far more specific robotics problem.