RP-World,
The exchange on this mailing list yesterday between Bruce Okkema and Eric Myers is a perfect example of the kind of thing I am talking about in the discussion of "Napster Fabbing" started by James Howison and me in the online RP conference. Below is a copy of what I posted about it on the discussion board this morning. This can be found at http://www.rapid-discussion.com/cgi-bin/discus2/show.cgi?19/62. If that link doesn't work for you, you may have to register for the conference (free) at http://www.rapid-discussion.com/conf_open.html.
Best regards,
Marshall Burns
President, Ennex Corporation
Marshall@Ennex.com
Los Angeles, USA, (310) 397-1314
http://www.Ennex.com
Saturday, December 16, 2000 - 07:10 am
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Readers of this discussion board who are also subscribers to the RP-ML (http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml) saw the following exchange of information yesterday:
Eric Myers of Commercial Pattern Inc. posted:
"Dear RPers,
"A local elementary school has requested some assistance from us. Does anyone have a file for an ancient Roman styled building? An STL , PROE or Solidworks file would be greatly appreciated.
"Thanks,"
A short while later, Bruce Okkema of Eagle Design posted:
"Eric and All,
"Last year my daughter asked for some help on a Latin project. Rather than doing the cardboard thing, we reverse engineered a roman temple from a couple of sketches in the encyclopedia and then built the model on the SLA. Caesar could have saved a little marble if he could have reviewed his designs this way.
"We have placed the resulting file on our ftp site and it is free for the download to anyone who is interested. The filename is temple.zip. It contains two files, one for the roof and one for the building proper. We will leave the file on the site until 12/19. The address is ftp.eagledesign.com or 208.163.3.11 for those of you that need IP. Login as anonymous with any password.
"Happy Holidays to All!"
This is exactly what I'm talking about here! Bruce had designed a temple model for his daughter. Eric needed a temple design and asked about where to get one, and Bruce offered his. Bruce could just as well have asked for a $100 or $10 or 50-cent royalty from anyone who wanted to download the design, and then it would have been a commercial transaction instead of the free sharing that it was in this case. The number of people taking Bruce up on his offer of the data will be higher the lower he makes the royalty, and will presumably be largest when he offers it for free as he did here. Bruce benefits by, aside from the good feeling of helping Eric's local elementary school, free publicity for his company when people see the work that he did on his daughter's temple model.
RP-ML subscribers know that this kind of thing is going on all the time. Last month Phill Dickens asked for StL files of birds. We get requests for airplanes, cars, buildings, and all different kinds of animals. Sometimes the desired design is freely available on a public site like Clemson's (ftp://ftp.vr.clemson.edu/pub/rp/STL_objects). Other times, the inquirer is sent to a commercial site like Viewpoint (http://www.viewpoint.com). And still other times, it will be a more personal exchange like that between Bruce and Eric yesterday.
Napster fabbing is already here! All that's left is for it to grow in sophistication and usage.
Marshall
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