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Insiders

Diffbot and Remo follow the sponsorware release strategy, which means that new features are first exclusively released to sponsors as part of Insiders. Read on to learn what sponsorships achieve, how to become a sponsor to get access to Insiders, and what's in for you!

What is Insiders?

DiffBot and Remo Insiders are private forks of DiffBot and Remo respectively, hosted as a private GitHub repository. Almost1 all new features are developed as part of these forks, which means that they are immediately available to all eligible sponsors, as they are made collaborators of this repository.

Every feature is tied to a [funding goal] in monthly subscriptions. When a funding goal is hit, the features that are tied to it are merged back into DiffBot or Remo and released for general availability, making them available to all users. Bugfixes are always released in tandem.

Sponsorships start as low as $10 a month.2

What sponsorships achieve

Sponsorships make this project sustainable, as they buy the maintainers of this project time – a very scarce resource – which is spent on the development of new features, bug fixing, stability improvement, issue triage and general support. The biggest bottleneck in Open Source is time.3

How to become a sponsor

Thanks for your interest in sponsoring! In order to become an eligible sponsor with your GitHub account, visit fjp's sponsor profile, and complete a sponsorship of $10 a month or more. You can use your individual or organization GitHub account for sponsoring.

You can cancel your sponsorship anytime.4

Become a sponsor

Available features

The following features are solely available via DiffBot and Remo Insiders:

Remo STL files

The public Remo Description only has empty placeholders for Remo's STL files. There are two ways to get the real files:

  • Buy the STL files

    A one-time payment on Gumroad. You download all of Remo's STL files and can start printing, and the purchase supports this project.

    Get the Remo STL files

  • Sponsor and get Remo Insiders

    From $10 a month on GitHub Sponsors. You get Remo Insiders, a private Git repository with the STL files that you clone and pull, and new features first.

    Become a sponsor

Remo Insiders is the private repository remo_description_insiders, a version of Remo Description with all of Remo's STL files, stored with Git LFS. The link only works once you have access. Then:

  1. Set up Git LFS and GitHub authentication, as described in Git and GitHub.

  2. Clone it into your ROS workspace's src folder instead of the public remo_description. Both contain a package named remo_description, so keep only one of them in the workspace:

    1
    git clone https://github.com/ros-mobile-robots/remo_description_insiders.git

The dev container imports the public repository; using Remo Insiders there is planned in diffbot#104.

Funding

Goals

The following section lists all funding goals. Each goal contains a list of features prefixed with a checkmark symbol, denoting whether a feature is already available or planned, but not yet implemented. When the funding goal is hit, the features are released for general availability.

$ 500 – Bärglistock

  • PID tuning on MCU using topic instead of requiring re-flashing
  • Remo: RPLidar 1 lidar platform
  • Add tutorials to documentation

$ 1,000 – Mont Durand

  • Raspberry Pi Camera support
  • Reset odometry

$ 2,000 – Eiger

  • IMU support
  • OAK-1 support
  • OAK-D support

$ 2,500 – Castor

  • Display (HMI) support
  • Add diffbot_mbf package using move_base_flex, the improved version of move_base

$ 5,000 – Nordend

  • ROS 2

Goals completed

This section lists all funding goals that were previously completed, which means that those features were part of Insiders, but are now generally available and can be used by all users.

$ 0 – Schneestock

Frequently asked questions

Payment

We don't want to pay for sponsorship every month. Are there any other options?

Yes. You can sponsor on a yearly basis by switching your GitHub account to a yearly billing cycle. If for some reason you cannot do that, you could also create a dedicated GitHub account with a yearly billing cycle, which you only use for sponsoring (some sponsors already do that).

If you have any problems or further questions, please reach out to ros@fjp.at.

Terms

Are we allowed to use Insiders under the same terms and conditions as DiffBot and Remo?

Yes. Whether you're an individual or a company, you may use DiffBot and Remo Insiders precisely under the same terms as DiffBot and Remo, which are given by the BSD 3-Clause License. However, we kindly ask you to respect the following guidelines:

  • Please don't distribute the source code of Insiders. You may freely use it for public, private or commercial projects, privately fork or mirror it, but please don't make the source code public, as it would counteract the sponsorware strategy.

  • If you cancel your subscription, you're automatically removed as a collaborator and will miss out on all future updates of Insiders. However, you may use the latest version that's available to you as long as you like. Just remember that GitHub deletes private forks.

  1. In general, every new feature is first exclusively released to sponsors, but sometimes upstream dependencies enhance existing features that must be supported by DiffBot. ↩

  2. Note that $10 a month is the minimum amount to become eligible for Insiders. While GitHub Sponsors also allows to sponsor lower amounts or one-time amounts, those can't be granted access to Insiders due to technical reasons. ↩

  3. Making an Open Source project sustainable is exceptionally hard: maintainers burn out, projects are abandoned. That's not great and very unpredictable. The sponsorware model ensures that if you decide to use DiffBot or Remo, you can be sure that bugs are fixed quickly and new features are added regularly. ↩

  4. If you cancel your sponsorship, GitHub schedules a cancellation request which will become effective at the end of the billing cycle. This means that even though you cancel your sponsorship, you will keep your access to Insiders as long as your cancellation isn't effective. All charges are processed by GitHub through Stripe. As we don't receive any information regarding your payment, and GitHub doesn't offer refunds, sponsorships are non-refundable. ↩

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