[hackerspaces] Idea: things.hackerspaces.org now that Thingiverse is not ...

[Jerry Isdale]

on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:57:58 -0700
Matt Joyce wrote...
> But, in the earliest days Unix cost money.
> When the technology is still emerging it's sold as a commercial
> product.  But later one, as it became a fundamental necessity of other
> products it was standardized and turned into first BSD then minix and
> linux.

The earliest days of UNIX were basically free - you got a 9 track tape with cover letter.
Everything else, including format of the tape was on you... and the usenix community.
INTERactive Systems started selling supported UNIX about 1978 (maybe 77 or 79?) others (SCO) followed suit.

Standardization of Unix has never really happened. There are lots of efforts with varying degrees of success
This continues today with all the variant versions of Linux (aka distributions), and other unix variants.

This lack of standard meant software could not be bought/compile on one system and run on anyone else's system
any unix/linux hacker knows you really need to recompile - and have all the right dependencies in right places

3d printing faces some of the same 'standard' challenges.
One of the nice things about Makerbot over last few years is there was a community of people that had essentially the same equipment, and could swap code, objects, and upgrades.  Sorta akin to the UNIX world back in 70's-early 90s.
The DIY CNC world (of which diy 3d printers are a subset) has this non-standards issue in spades.
Mostly because there are so many variants to experiment with, and competing goals & limitations (eg use MDF vs Plywood vs acrylic vs Al...)

One of the big challenges in low end cnc bots is the desire to play with the tech vs use them to make stuff.
While many people have both goals, increasingly people want them to Make Stuff.
for that, you just want the dang machine to work... like Matt's example of the Epilog Laser.

As for the thingiverse/things.hackerspace...  There are legal issues for any such repository.
A post this morning (oh heck its already end of day for most of the world, barely afternoon here)
on the Makerbot blog from their staff attorney trying to clarify things a bit...
   http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/26/our-lawyer-explains-the-thingiverse-terms-of-service/
probably already linked 10x here.

There are other open repositories for hardware, like the Open Design Engine (https://opendesignengine.net/)
these could support 3d prints, but go well beyond that for hardware of many types.

Jerry Isdale
isdale at gmail.com



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.hackerspaces.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20120926/a01ee598/attachment.html>