So basically, you want another commercial entity to provide a free platform
so you can make money. I get that. It is difficult to build a brand
presence, much easier to piggyback off an established site. I don't have
problem with you making money or trying to make a living, and it is logical
to try to turn every site into a marketing channel for your own purposes.

The thing is though, a lot of people, me included, are not looking for
stuff to buy on thingiverse, nor do we want to browse through ND adverts
from budding artists. I am looking for interesting stuff to build, adapt,
maybe improve, and share. If Big Corp want to adopt up ("steal") my design
and start selling widgets, they are welcome to! Big Corp probably make it
better and cheaper than I could. If they make $$$ off my design, it's not
really lost revenue because they were never going to hire me as a designer
in the first place.

Surely there are already dozens of commerical sites where people can sell
stuff - basically half the internet is now shops. It would be really nice
to retain one small part that invokes the original spirit of the internet -
sharing information for its own sake, and no money has to change hands to
""incentivize"" people to participate.

On Feb 22, 4:38 pm, BobC <bobcousin...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Boy, I can just feel the love here ...

Just because my needs are not your needs, some of you guys (not all of
you) really want to crucify me don't you...

What I opened this post with was not a challenge to you.  It's wasn't
a slap in the face.  It was me, asking you a question and presenting a
view.  It wasn't an attack on your ability to get free stuff.

I'll address your evaluation of me ...

On Feb 22, 4:38 pm, BobC <bobcousin...@googlemail.com> wrote:

There are no commercial entities out there that provide a free
platform for me to make money.  I would not be interested in doing
business with a "free platform" because they won't be around for very
long.  Anything I make money from takes a cut, as it should.

On Feb 22, 4:38 pm, BobC <bobcousin...@googlemail.com> wrote:

To call this piggybacking is very misleading.  It's a partnership.  I
like partnerships.  I would have a problem feeding off of someone.  I
don't feel entitled to anything free.  It's not my style.  I didn't
grow up in an affluent household.  I grew up using my paper route
money to buy socks and underwear.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Thingiverse and Makerbot are
all about giving and not recieving.  You get free designs to print
out.  Makerbot gets to sell its machine and the material you need to
print these things.  This is not hidden.  Its a symbiotic relationship
between Makerbot and you.

People work at Makerbot, and they get paid.  They pay for their roof
and buy their food.  This is not evil.  It's probably what you do
every day too.  It's what I do with art, and part of being a fulltime
artist is looking for opportunities just like everyone else.  It's in
my personality to give artistic expressions to you free of charge, but
my needs don't always let me do that.

-Whystler

This thread has had some good ideas in it.

Some designs and designers on thingiverse are really top notch, but most of
us are not trained industrial designers or mechanical engineers. Those who
are and share here have other ways of creating billable work.

Sharing is good, and can help raise your public profile.  A long time ago,
I abandoned any pretence that I might make a living from my photography,
despite formal training and several years working as a photographer. I keep
my pics on Flickr, but set them with a copyright so people have to ask
before using them. Mostly,  I want to know if they will be used.

On thingiverse, people can download my designs and do whatever they want
with them. I doubt my designs will be used commercially, but would
appreciate any credit for reuse. If my designs lead to a paid commission,
that would be great.

If anybody were going to prepare a design for commercial use, they should
plan on doing a fair amount of desing testing before releasing it to the
mass production process.

I guess I see my photos, designs, videos and writing more as a calling card
and gift to the world than anything else.

Thingiverse and other online communities are excellent repositories so I
can find the file when I need it, often years after I create it.

Hope that helps.
Chris
On Feb 22, 2012 9:53 PM, "Whystler" <shawn...@hotmail.com> wrote:

I have found this thread to be very interesting and thought provoking. I hope we can all stay civil and respectful.

Whystler,
I feel the pushback you are getting is partly based on what the community understands Thinigverse to be. A no-charge web portal to share digital designs (intellectual property) with others. The emphasis on this site is sharing, and it is structured to encourage sharing and making objects that have their designs posted. MBI as a company creates IP, and does share it freely, making money as you say by selling the bits and hardware and expendables for you to make other things. There is the 'Flattr' feature which allows charitable giving to those who you wish, but I am not sure how much it is really used.

there are other venues to share designs (or designed objects) with the intention of profiting by them. Ponoko, Shapeways and Etsy come to mind readily, and I am sure you already take advantage of them. Have you made a support/feature request to Thingiverse? THat would be a more direct route, and they might respond with a reason why they would agree or disagree with that kind of change. But as you can see the 'group mind' that can be inferred from the reponses to this thread, charging for designs isn't in the perceived DNA of Thingiverse.

This is all my own opinion, I welcome people to correct me if I am wrong. I always find the work posted on Thingiverse to be inspiring, especially yours Whystler.

All the best,
O.

On Feb 22, 2012, at 9:53 PM, Whystler wrote:

Good thoughts Owen and Chris.  Thanks for sharing.  Everything I am
reading here is useful, even if sometimes it hits a heart string or
two lol :)

-Whystler

ja, good discussion to have. My 2c - I use the NC license more out of
curiosity than anything, if someone likes something I do enough to use
it commercially, I'd love to know about it. And I guess as an academic
there's always the chance it'll be useful as a line item in my CV or
tenure application file.

I would be opposed to any kind of official payment scheme on Thingiverse
(as opposed to the use-your-own-judgement flattr approach). Right now
the site culture is to share everything reflexively - possibly with some
limits, but if you see something you like I don't think most people even
look at the license unless they intend to post a derivative or something
- they just pull down the files and play. If the option to require
(morally, in practise it'd be hard to enforce) payment were there, and a
few people use it, then a few more will think - "well, if he's asking
for money, why shouldn't I get mine?". Then it snowballs, and all of a
sudden thingiverse will look like one of those sites where you go
looking for a piece of freeware that you know exists, and have to wade
through page after page of crippleware demos and expensive shareware
that you have no interest in to find it.

Also I think it'd end up like the patent system - some cases would be
valid, but many more would be people jumping in with something obvious
and then ranting about wanting to be paid just because they were the
first to post some concept that you incorporated in your design.

I can understand your motivation, but I think it would just break
everything I like about the site.

Mark

On 22/02/2012 11:48 PM, Whystler wrote:

Copyright exists to allow individuals and formal organizations to have
a monopoly on their creations.  Copyleft exists to address the needs
of adhoc groups of contributors.  The goals of copyleft are not
contrary to capitalism, nor are they interwoven with it; and NC is not
appropriate for copyleft because it is an asymmetrical restriction
within the participants of a project.  This is part of the whole "free
as in freedom, not as in free beer" thing.

CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-SA, and CC-BY-ND-NC are not copyleft licenses, and
they are not free culture licenses.  They do exist to make it simple
for authors to allow their work to be distributed (and some times
modified under very limited terms), but they work more as trustworthy
means of informing your audience that you are not going to sue them
for doing so.

Another way of looking at it, is that CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, and CC0 are
tools for encouraging active community participation.  CC-BY-NC,
CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC-SA, and CC-BY-ND-NC are tools for encouraging
passive community participation.

It has already been acknowledged that there already are places like
ponoko and shapeways where you can sell things to people.  The
difference is that those are companies that sell time on their
machines.  The purpose of those sites is primarily to facilitate
people buying time on their machines.  Thingiverse is ran by a company
that sells 3d printers.  And in many respects, the purpose of
Thingiverse is to get people to buy more Makerbots =)

It so happens that in the case of things like ponoko and shapeways,
mabye free culture doesn't work as an understood theme in community
behavior for the greater operation of those businesses.  For
Thingiverse, open contribution actually does make sense as a normative
community behavior.  One of these things attracts designers with one
particular set of needs, and the other attracts designers of
completely different needs.  That is just how it is.

Maybe Thingiverse will eventually evolve into yet another digital
market place. Maybe it won't.  Truth is, if it did; that wouldn't mean
that the open community has now finally addressed the needs of the
disenfranchised proprietary designer community.  That would just means
an open community's old venue sucks for them, and that they'll
probably just go somewhere else. Thingiverse is just a website,
afterall.

Whystler: you could release your work CC-BY-NC-ND on Thingiverse and
include a link in the description to your etsy shop or whatever... or
is there a policy against that sort of thing in Thingiverse's terms of
service?  If you want to allow others to distribute your work for you,
but aren't comfortable doing so without restrictions, NC or ND might
really be what you ought to use.

On Feb 23, 8:17 pm, Jonathan Palecek <jonat...@creativecommons.org>
wrote:

Normally, I am very happy to extend a creative commons license with a
non-commercial specification.  I love Thingiverse as it is now.
However, it is once I entered the "pet monster" contest that I felt I
needed more information to understand why an NC license is seen as
undesirable by much of the community.    There is a policy against
using NC licenses to be considered for this challenge.  I just needed
more information and the advice of the community before I could feel
comfortable creating brand new works specifically for the contest.

-Whystler

Ah, right, dur =)

Well, its up to you if you want to do something for fun.

By the way, I've really appreciated your comments here Jonathan.
They've been informative and have helped me. :)

-Whystler

Well thank you ^_^

Open Source is a relatively new concept. You are not the first person to
not "get it", and you won't be last. I said explicitly that I am not
against people trying to make money, but you ignore my (our) other concerns
and instead repeatedly come back to this straw man. I can see why people
are giving you a hard time. You attitude reminds me of Dolmansaxlil "Only
one, tiny little thing wrong here - they're not *making money* for the *
Dolmansaxlil* Shoe Corporation!"

FOSS is a simple concept for hobbyists: share and share-alike, not money
needs to change hands. However, it presents a challenge for commerce as
well as free-lance or self-employed practitioners. Mostly the traditional
business model is to create value by artificial scarcity. That means having
something that no-one else can own, whether it is a brand, or a design or
product. Trademarks, patents, copyrights and other methods allow companies
to make these exclusive claims. Exclusive claims are granted to recognise
the work the author has put into them, this is seen as a just thing to do,
and productive for society. This can lead to extremes where near-monopolies
unfairly exclude competition. So there is a balance between reward for
enterprise and healthy competition.

Free/Open stuff pulls out the major plank from this, the IP is open and not
exclusively owned. Commerce must find other ways to make money without
owning the IP. I am not saying ownership of IP is necessarily wrong or bad,
just that is the traditional business model and the Free/Open model must be
based on something different. Unfortunately people find it hard to figure
out ways of making money without exclusive ownership, so they try to have
their cake and eat : call it "Open" for marketing purposes but actually try
to retain rights to it. A recent example is OpenOffice. Once you've opened
your IP, that is it, you lose complete control. If you don't want that,
keep it closed. But don't try to make it "sort of Open but really like it
to be Closed". That does not have the desired effect for users or authors.

In most competitions the work submitted becomes the property of the
competition organisers. In open source competitions you get to keep
ownership of your work, so you are already benefitting there. But you still
want more.

Bob, I'm not going to spend a lot of time beating a dead horse... So
I'll just say this...

You are making assumptions about me and my interests that are not
correct.  While the fact that your assumptions about me are wrong
nullifies most of what you are saying, you do have the occasional
point that is interesting in this discussion.  So I appreciate that.

I tend to make assumptions about people too ... we're all human - we
do it.  But I don't use it as part of a discussion with someone,
because that would taint the purpose and very easily make my whole
opinion unstable.

If I were to make the same mistake, I could say that you were born in
the late 80s or 1990s and as a result are used to the "free life",
which you mistake for open source, and this is why you think that you
should be able to demand entry to my brain to pick out any IP you like
and use to your advantage.  And then I would try to explain to you
that this is not the spirit of open source.  It's more like a pirate
in open source clothing - which is not the kind of piracy that began
as an activism towards change within the open source movement - it's
the new breed of "I deserve it because my mommy said I could have
anything i want" kind of piracy.

But there's as good a chance that I am wrong about you, as I am right,
so I don't use it as a judgement platform on which to base my opinion
for this discussion.  If I were doing this, then you would have a
right to feel I was attacking you rather than trying to effect some
interesting change in your perception.

-Whystler

On Feb 26, 2012, at 7:46 PM, Whystler wrote:

None of this seems like a productive contribution to the original discussion topic, nor at this point relevant to Thingiverse.  If you want to discuss the shortcomings of other list members (real or hypothetical), that's none of my business.  But please do so privately.

With respect to your original topic, I'll just say this: you are *not* required to like or use Thingiverse.  You are *not* required to like the terms of use on Thingiverse.  You are *not* required to like the terms of a given contest. And, if you don't like the entry terms of a contest, you are *not* required to enter.  

Most companies when offering a design competition will stipulate that either (A) the entries become *the property* of the company sponsoring the contest or at a bare minimum (B) have the right to show off the winning designs in the contest.    I, personally, would generally tend *not* to enter a design contest (A) where my entries became the property of another company.  However I (again, personally), would have no problem entering a contest B, where I would grant the contest-sponsoring company the right to show off the winning and non-winning entries.

This is, after all, the "basic bargain" of a contest, isn't it?  You give permission for the sponsoring company to use your design for promotional purposes in exchange for a chance at winning the contest, with prizes or just recognition.  But here's the thing:  If MakerBot Industries or 3D Artist Magazine want to announce the contest winners, and show off the winning designs, that itself CONSTITUTES COMMERCIAL USE.    How does it even make sense to make a design contest entry that is licensed under an -NC license of any sort?    (Spoiler: it does not.)  

I, personally, think that MakerBot Industries and 3D Artist Magazine have a very elegant approach to entry "ownership" in their contest, saying that the contest is open to designs that people are willing to publicly share, and without exerting any ownership of their own.    Whether you want to participate or not is entirely your choice.  But I don't think that it makes sense for you to get your feathers ruffled over this.  If you didn't like the terms of entry for a given contest, you shouldn't have entered.   It's that simple.  

-Windell

Can I just be really clear and say:

I know, respect and **love** the OPEN SOURCE ideal.  I am very happy
that we, as a community and a culture have embraced this.

My concern was with the community's push against using open source
friendly licenses that specified "non commercial" use only.  I wanted
to understand why we would want to peer pressure our artists and
innovators into making designs that others were allowed to profit from
monetarily - and it was explained to me.

I got frustrated when folks put me in the category of not being an
open source supporter, which I totally am, and always have been.  I
won't stand for this misconception, and certainly have a right to
defend myself in that regard.

-Whystler

I think to save things here for everyone, I am just going to consider
this thread locked.  I will read what is here, and swallow it whole
without responding :)  Just please, if you are tempted to paint me as
a money grubbing capitalist whose ideals are not in line with open
source, know that you are way off base, and re-read my posts with an
open mind and you'll realize this.

-Whystler

On Feb 27, 10:41 am, Whystler <shawn...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On 27 Feb, 03:46, Whystler <shawn...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Your assumptions about me are quite wrong. I don't think you are being
honest
with yourself about what your interests really are.

The horse was probably quite ill to start with.