New LinuxCNC-Ethercat git tree

The licensing issue is that to sell ethercat machines you must register as a member of the Ethercat Technology Group and you need to be a registered company. Their income comes from royalties from royalties on the ethercat chips so its not an issue for a user of a machine.
Linuxcnc is  a community, not a company so it can't join so we can't distribute ethercat type technology. iGh on the other hand is a company so can do what they are doing.

This has been discussed with Marten Rosten the boss of the ETG by some German members and myself  when he was in Australia.

With the advances with all of the repositories, it is a perfect soluution and does not clutter the users PC if he is not using ethercat. 

Hey folks, this is Bjarne from IgH . Rod pointed me at this discussion.
So, I'm happy with replacing the repository in our OpenSuSE Build Service (OBS) Repository. I think we should automate the deployment. I opened an issue at GitHub to discuss the details.

I'd like to point out that in our OBS repository, we use the upstreamed linuxcnc packages to build linuxcnc-ethercat. OBS does not offer to include external repositories, like the linuxcnc repo. But installing the EtherCAT master and the library works nevertheless.

Regarding the licensing issue: EtherCAT is, afaik, a registered trademark of Beckhoff. So, if you want to use the name "EtherCAT", you have to have a permission from Beckhoff. This applies especially if you want to distribute an EtherCAT master, like we at IgH do. But there is an employee of Beckhoff who has contributed GPLv2+ code to the IgH master, so we at IgH feel confident in distributing the master as GPL'ed code.

Cheers, Bjarne

Thanks Bjarne,
@scottlaird, seems you have got a way forward now and I noticed your PR had been committed very cool!

When talking to the ETG, you need to be a comapny to join per 3.2 of their bylaws
www.ethercat.org/download/documents/ETG_By-Laws.pdf
This precludes linuxcnc from being a member.. But igh can be, and they are then able to distribute a master and use the logo.
So I think hosting the hal driver with igh is absolutely awesome and now there is a current maintained repo, its even better. By not including it in linuxcnc is an advantage becasue it can be updated outside of our release cycle

Linuxcnc are very risk averse having had to change their name in response to a cease and desist order in the past.

HI  rodw
I'm sorry, I don't know if the question is relevant
I can't compile to linuxcnc-ethercat/src
the lcec.h and lcec.c files of my device
are the current changes the cause???
Thank you

Why would you want to compile from source when its all in a repo now.
Install linuxcnc 2.9.2 and  you are good to go.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install linuxcnc-ethercat

the source code has been dodgy for years