It has been over a decade since development of ROS 2 began, and eight years since the first non-beta release, Ardent Apalone. Over the years we have seen ROS 2 usage grow to be by far the majority of all ROS users.
However, there is still a significant set of users who are on ROS 1, even as its final release went end-of-life in mid-2025. We recognise that many users have good reasons for still using ROS 1, such as long-lived products that must continue to be supported. For all of our remaining ROS 1 users, we have assembled in this article a list of resources that are commercially available to support you. These organisations provide a variety of services that can be of use to someone who is continuing to use ROS 1 in a commercial setting, such as bug fixes and security patches. If you have a need for such services, we encourage you to give them a call.
- Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution that is frequently used as a ROS platform, provide an Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) service for ROS 1 users.
Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution that is frequently used as a ROS platform, provide an Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) service for ROS 1 users.
- Ekumen Labs have been working on and with ROS for over 13 years. Their engineers have a deep knowledge of ROS 1 and how to support applications built on it.
Ekumen Labs have been working on and with ROS for over 13 years. Their engineers have a deep knowledge of ROS 1 and how to support applications built on it.
- Honu Robotics is made up of engineers with a cumulative decades of experience with ROS, including several of the core contributors.
Honu Robotics is made up of engineers with a cumulative decades of experience with ROS, including several of the core contributors.
Geoffrey Biggs
Geoffrey Biggs is the CTO at the Open Source Robotics Foundation, where he leads the technical efforts of the OSRF, including both the open-source projects themselves (at an abstract level) and the work the OSRF performs to support those projects. Previously, he was a software engineer at Open Source Robotics Corporation, where he worked mainly on ROS and Open-RMF. Geoff has more than 20 years of experience working with and on open-source software, beginning with the Player Project. He is constantly looking for ways to convince the world that formal methods are great.
https://openrobotics.org
