Ultimaker to file patents... with dubious reasons

Yes, this is no April fools' day: Ultimaker is filing its first patents. Wow. We have cheap 3D printers at home specifically because old patents eventually ended up in the public domain. So: no lessons learnt?

"The industrial additive manufacturing market has some strong players,

some of whom are very proactive with patents. As such, we need to take

extra measures to protect our intellectual property (IP)"  Makerbot?  Ultimaker!

I really have mixed feelings (update D+2: given the feedback on this article, I now have no more mixed feelings: makers will probably flee away from the brand).

A lot of people say "it is how things are". But growing bigger is no excuse for playing the game: complying with the system is probably not a way to help fixing it. The bigger the company the more responsible it is of this stupid status quo.

Do you remember BQ trying to patent stuff also? They reacted quickly and withdrew after the community outrage (see Tom's disclaimer).

I hardly imagine the heated debates at Ultimaker headquarters on the matter. Sure, there are no real solution in the real world of intellectual property, and I understand that some thought they had to file patents at this point in the growth of the company.

But what annoys me much is how they justify the move to the community. They invoke reasons to file patents that are dubious in my opinion. The call to a defensive patent portfolio, for example, neither has legal ground nor it works well (more on that after the break). But in any case, applying for a patent does not help or defend the community in any way. Heh, even the founder of Ultimaker himself told so and years ago.:

“If it weren’t for patents, 3D printers would have made it to consumers long before.
It’s only now, with important 3D printing patents expiring, that the technology flourishes.”
Erik De Bruijn (founder of Ultimaker)

"In a Bid to Protect IP and Create More Freedom to Innovate,
Ultimaker Announced their Decision to Invest in Defensive Patents"
I hardly beleive they did write this! Hey, They Even Capitalized Every Word :D
Actually, patents may even stop your innovation as you have to stay within their protective bounds.

I used to like the brand, but I recently started to be skeptical of the claims. So is Ultimaker heading the same ugly way as Makerbot, as I detailed in length in 2014? Do not read me wrong: I really do not think so at this point.

But ... nobody can tell that it will never end the same way: there is simply no warranty. Trying to justify the move the way they do is wrong in my opinion and a step closer to a less friendly business. I thought a lot about it, both as a maker and as a businessman, and I do not like it.

A huge and unique cross-cultural fablab in Europe!

I was wondering what +Florian Horsch was doing lately. If you are a reader of this blog and do not know already about this great person, you may remember him because he kindly invited me the Fabcon conference for a speech about the businessman and the maker in Germany, 2014. I would have bet he was on a novel and useful project, but I did not expect it to be this big and humanist.

One of the biggest European fablab (725m²), and most probably the most inter-cultural one!

Being a contractor or a full-time employee?

Working as a contractor versus regular employment?

I regularly see the fear about working as a contractor. Lately I was part of a discussion that started like: could it be risky for any subsequent 9-to-5 career? I strongly disagree: being a contractor is interestingly a warranty for me to find again a new job in case I fail as a contractor! In my opinion, it will indeed help most careers, as I an employer I would favor people that took the risk to try, whether they were successful or not. Contracting both provides and requires skills at the same time, more than any regular 9-to-5 job.

I feel like I can handle all sorts of professional blows, like being fired. And first of all, well, I will not be fired as long as I am my own boss! This is because I feel each day insured by varied and evolving professional experiences together with a growing professional network.

Here is a post about how I ended up as being a very happy contractor, after having been a state employee, a full time engineer in a small family-owned company, then in a stock-valued much larger company, then a CEO and a CTO in a start-up (silly names), and a very well-paid part-time employee in a startup... before I flew on my own in the naked simplicity of a contractor in a cooperative, with no mess.

Disclaimer: my experience is all in the so-called "new" technologies, but it may still help beyond.

3D printing sponsorship: getting hired and getting fired ... as with any other job? :(

A blow to Octoprint and to the 3D printing community? May be not.

This short post is triggered by the recent lay off of Gina Häußge by BQ, its sponsor and maker of some opensource 3D printers (notably the witbox and hephestos). And by the fact she goes with a few others, more recently hired, well-known people like Thomas Sanladerer (a well known high-quality educational video blogger on youtube) or Nils Hitze (currently an evangelist for rent, and a pillar in the largest 3D printing community on Google Plus). The are part of a massive lay off, so it shall not be felt as specifically related to individuals or to the open source movement (in my opinion).

But why does it matter to the average 3D printer user? Easy one: Gina is the founder and main developer of Octoprint, a "baby monitor for 3D printers", or more technically a massively popular and very useful software which runs on a Raspberry Pi and which lets you remotely control 3D printers. It can be used on BQ 3D printers as other brands, and many companies even ship it with their own printers (when they are not just stealing it!).

No more sponsorship equals less features and less maintenance.

Octoprint is a milestone in usability as a remote control, just like Cura simplified slicing 3D models.
Both are free and open-sourced, initially made by smart developers on their free time,
and who later got sponsored for keeping on doing their good work.
(hey I realize only now they were printing one of my early designs in 2012 for this action shot!)

"It is better for your safety that we are opaque" (Volkswagate)

"It is better for your safety that we are opaque"

I just read an article on the BBC related to Volkswagen and the "(...) argument for stopping people fiddling with those systems, because if you don't know what you are doing - or even worse do know and have malicious intent - you could create genuine safety issues."

Volkswagen in 1969 by John Muir
But are we still complete idiots?

This post not only relate to Volkswagen, but to any big company using proprietary stuff and saying it is good for you. You can replace "car" with any non-open piece of software or hardware alike. Transparency is just so hard to depreciate, especially when you are talking to your own customers.

Fortune 500 teller? 3D printing trends, reports, analyses and business intelligence...

Are the "high-level strategically analyzed reports" worth something?

Hey, could my blog be so informative? :)

I am regularly contacted, mostly on linkedIn, by experts that seek data. The last time it was for a company that compiles data and trends "for the Fortune 500 companies". Which does not excite me more than that, and here is why.

Such data are usually sold at an incredible price to managers that think they would get a better clue at the market, with the idea that they would be more profitable. But there are two traps here.

The first one is: am I really enough of an expert to give clues to Fortune 500 companies? I am mostly an iconoclast, e.g. when I say not to invest in Makerbot at all (neither as a customer nor as an investor, but I have a full-length analysis why I say so), or when I explain why, imho, "pro/expensive" FDM printers are almost a scam nowadays. OK, I may be better than a monkey and provide a few useful reviews (e.g. materials for artists, or what cannot be 3D printed...). But still, asking my opinion on the market trends could cast a doubt on the forthcoming corresponding report. Oh, well, may be they also want data from makers -- why not after all.

As a manager, do you really need accurate trends and data?
Or do you need only the feeling that you have some?

Secondly and as importantly, the reviews are most often never used in reality. Once bought, they are dropped on the desk of a subordinate in the company, with the advice to get some insight from the document. The underlying idea is: since it is expensive it must be valuable...

The businessman and the maker

The Businessman and the Maker

Businessman v.s. Maker (although Dilbert is certainly not a maker!)

At Fabcon 2014 3D print fair (my feedback is here), I gave a speech entitled "Make it yourself: it can be better than what the industry sells you!".

It was insipred by this former post on the same vein, which rang a bell in Florian Horsh head (so much he very kindly invited me).

3D print fair at Fabcon 2014: feelings and people

Fabcon 2014 - was worth 2575 kilometers and 31 hours on a motorbike!

So I was kindly offered to give the closing talk of the 2014 edition of Fabcon 3.D in Erfurt, Germany.

My talk is now available online as slides, and also as a youtube video (for some unknown reason I cannot embed it here).

Note that I added a short separate post that resumes it, with a few new ideas: The businessman and the maker. This one is about the people and projects I met there.

My spoken English should definitely be improved (and I was half sick half exhausted), but it will spare you pushes on the space bar for the next slide, and more importantly, you still get details in the 25 minutes not-so-lively speech. My apologies, as it was the first time I spoke in public for years (back to my time at the long-gone Palm company, and more significantly during my PhD, huh, 14 year ago!). Please read ahead.

Quick comparison: pro versus low cost FDM 3D printers

Are so-called "professional" entry-level 3D FDM printers worth their price?

A LinkedIn user in my network asked for more data when I said that "low cost" FDM printers could compare favorably to "professional" (and expensive) printers. Sure, it is a bold statement, and it does not hold for every of the many "levels of quality", as there are just too numerous. But let me get into more details.

In my opinion, an Ultimaker rev. 2 (~2K€) compares very nicely to a Stratasys UPrint-Se (~23K€)

I certainly do not want to say the "pro" printers are crappy, nor that any brand is crappier than the other, but I had the chance to compare my Ultimaker prints with a "professional" Stratasys entry-level printer (i.e. 1200€ versus 23K€). The outcome is that I just would never swap the two even if I was offered the "pro" one for free! Huh.

Now I am a power tinkerer, I know how to print, I prototype the printer itself, and I cherish freedom, but I tried to keep this bias out of the following arguments.

A rant: open or closed, you get what you pay for.

A rant: open or closed, you get what you pay for.

I got "stimulated" again by a feedback on my wooden patterns related to the Python script I posted on thingiverse.

Here is the request (which I must say is fully honest and respectful):

     Very cool thing, but does anybody know how to use this with a makerbot?

     How can I edit the x3g file? Or an other way, how can I convert a gcode to x3g?

     Thanks in advance! -- j.

I have checked Markerbot own site: "Your Replicator 2X can only read files in the .x3g format".

So bad for their customers: they just do not care about the decade-old standard gcode format that all other players support in the field !

A famous strip from Nudel and his repraprip blog regarding Makerbot

Thinking about it for a while, I must say I will not help at all in this respect. Let me say why.