Eclipse Basyx - reestructuring review

PMI link: Eclipse BaSyx

Due to the increasing cooperation between Eclipse BaSyx and the Industrial Digital Twin Alliance, the project would like to move under the Digital Twin top level project. The project would also like to change the license for our code from the currently used EPL-v2 to the MIT License for Eclipse BaSyx. We'll use this issue to keep track of the restructuring review that will cover both this aspects.

Background

The Eclipse BaSyx was started in 2016 to create an open-source Industry 4.0 middleware that provides a foundation for the development of both concrete I4.0 installations, but also (possibly commercial) software tools. The Asset Administration Shell is a core technology that we implement. Over the last few years, Eclipse BaSyx became popular as the reference implementation for Asset Administration Shells and I4.0 infrastructure components in general. In 2021, we began to consolidate the efforts in Germany regarding the implementation of industry strength Asset Administration Shells as technical foundation for digital twins under the umbrella of the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA). The IDTA did register an Eclipse top-level project for this. We therefore now would like to consolidate our efforts to implement open-source Industry 4.0 solutions, and collect the most relevant projects for this under the new top-level project „Digital Twins“.

The IDTA plans to provide an industry strength implementation of Asset Administration Shells with less features than Eclipse BaSyx, but with an even more thorough review to enable its use in mission critical scenarios. As Eclipse BaSyx provides already an implemented and tested Industry 4.0 infrastructure with the required features, we from Fraunhofer did propose to base the this reference on Eclipse BaSyx. The IDTA reference implementation however will be MIT Licensed, due to explicit requests from users. We did discuss this internally and came to the conclusion that changing to the MIT license for the Eclipse BaSyx project would be no harm, and the compatible license enables us to use and maintain the same code base wrt. to basic AAS features for BaSyx and for the IDTA components. This will prevent duplicate implementation and improve the code base of both projects. We therefore request the change of the license for Eclipse BaSyx from EPL-V2 to the MIT license.

License change

In order to implement the required license change, we need to complete the following:

• EMO (ED) approval
• IP rights transfer agreement signed by past contributors

Change of TLP

• PMCs notified