Since there are at least 4 open-source inspired tractor projects using ODrive ( @tlalexander @mabitter @Alexander_Jones ), I thought it might be good to start a thread on licensing and safety certification.
For licensing, I am biased towards the AGPLv3 as it is the strongest viral copyright license that I am aware is widely used. While I want to keep the ‘plain text’ simple, as I did with the preamble I appended to https://github.com/tmagik/ODrive/edit/estop/LICENSE.md, I also see the point that software licenses are just as complex as operating system kernels, and what might appear simple at first glance is anything but.
The same likely goes for safety certification and the corresponding liability impacts of autonomous things that move.
For farm tractors, owned and operated by the farmland owner, I also find the problem may be simplified to the following much more tractable (pun intended) problem of finding suitable liability insurance. We’ve had autonomous farm equipment for almost 80 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation ), and this seems to be easily handled by having the right insurance ( https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=795740 )
For more complicated situations… well that probably requires VC seed funding and lawyers, and I’d rather stick to engineering and farming.
I’d propose some kind of general model of owner-operators can do whatever their liability insurance will let them get away with. Anything more ‘industrial’, where the owner who paid for the machine is not the person who might get injured by the machine requires some higher level of due-diligence, engineering, and certification cost.
What does the community here think? Is there a reasonable difference between ‘DIY’, owner-operated, and industrial/commercial ratings? Are there more distinctions, or grades necessary here, and what kind of software, firmware, and hardware licensing and certification are necessary for each category?