From: Deelip Menezes (deelip@fpsols.com)
Date: Sat Mar 26 2005 - 08:01:53 EET
- Nothing is free
- There is always an investor
- There is always a customer
I beg to differ. My company, Floating Point Solutions
(http://www.fpsols.com), has create the OpenRP Initiative
(http://www.openrp.com). We do not, and I repeat, do not, hope to gain
any financial benefit from this initiative. All the software and
libraries at OpenRP are, and wilI always be, free of any cost and will
never expire. Its not that we tried to make some money first, failed,
and then decided to give it away for free. It was free from the
beginning. Whatever be your views on the usefulness and value of OpenRP
to the RP industry, more and more people are downloading and using it
everyday and have thanked us for the initiative. We have not earned
anything from the initiative. In fact, we pay for the domain name,
hosting and bandwidth.
On the other hand, Materialize has created the MGX file format (which
does the same thing as OpenRP and maybe more) and are giving away STLZip
for free to create MGX files. But the catch is that you need their
software (which you have to pay for) to extract STL data out of MGX
files. There is nothing wrong with that. They are just doing business
like how it has been done all along.
The point I am trying to make is that it is important to understand the
intentions of an individual or group before passing judgement on what we
think they appear to be doing.
My opinion on Adrian Bowyer's work:
We may or may not agree with the usefulness or feasibility of Adrian
Bowyer's work in its present form. But everything has a start. Alexander
Graham Bell didnt come up with a mobile phone. He started out by
inventing an "electrical speech machine". Today our lives are made much
easier because he took the trouble of thinking differently.
Adrian Bowyer stands to gain a lot from constructive criticizm and we
ought to give it to him.
/Deelip Menezes
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi] On
Behalf Of Dave Russell
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 1:19 AM
To: RP-ML
Subject: [rp-ml] Re: New machines could turn homes into small factories
It seems to me that this thread highlights a range of important
questions related to how a scientist should present his work to the
popular press and how the press should process the presentation for
publication (sometimes called the Media Lab Problem). In trying to
frame a few questions, I keep running into this:
Dr. Bowyer says:
>One of the many freedoms that follows from the eschewing of any sort of
ghastly "business model" and just giving something away
>pro bono is that it liberates you from the tyranny of customers and,
worse, investors.
Does anyone want to defend this proposition or can we agree that
- Nothing is free
- There is always an investor
- There is always a customer
I assert that this is important because all our judgments about projects
like this at least implicitly assume some sort of economic context.
Denying the existence of economic constraints gives us no place to
start.
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