What do we know about @ShapeDo ? I see people posting and discussing the migration aspect. And I had an e-mail from the last night - the intro was catchy - “There has recently been some turbulence in the community about the ownership of ideas.”
They don’t have an About us page (Sigh) so please fill in the blanks -
Who is behind @ShapeDo
How is it being funded, and what’s the long-term plan guys?
Why does it exist and what does it believe in / stand for.
We now know more about @Repables and that’s great. @YouMagine is also understood at this point.
We may all need to share things and designs on multiple sites, and that’s not such a bad thing.
Originally shared by Jeremie Francois
Object repositories… Six months ago I discovered @ShapeDo and its very nice “forking” design (their TOS is very nice also). Just for the sake of duplicating quickly all your objects hosted on Thingiverse, I recommend anyone to create an account there. But still, many of my things should belong to @YouMagine as they are Ultimaker “enhancements”, even though it is another 3D printer manufacturer which is backing it (I am uneasy with this, though it may be a better warranty in the middle term). I am uneasy to promote one repository “against” another and it just takes time to deal with many repositories, that I did not test all of course… I wish everyone did collaborate for a better repository, and that everyone uses @Thing_Tracker_Networ (go Gary, go!). TTN also ensures that the thing stays extremely open & volatile – I could even host my own “special” projects in my own servers. Please guys, try to support TTN
Back to Shapedo, I think it deserves more attention. Actually I was the one who asked for the thingiverse import option six months ago (12/21/13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDx6hPEVA6o&feature=youtu.be&t=7m52s PM), which they implemented it in the following week! It is plain straightforward with one click or so, and it even includes the keywords… With the recent TV outcry, they just posted a video, below.
Now for the sake of the community “traction”, I cannot make my mind. YouMagine seems to be the most common choice. It would be a better world if they could merge – which is now impossible I guess. :s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDx6hPEVA6o&feature=youtu.be
Hey @Richard_Horne . I am the co-founder that started ShapeDo. We are now four people. And I am going to give you the full history and current status.
ShapeDo was born when I had a talk with @Marvin_Stuart (who isn’t part of ShapeDo). After I backed the Rigidbot and started to develop OctoPi he came to me and said he wanted to make an open source version of Thingiverse. I told him that that was a boring idea. What I wanted was a site where my objects “write themselves”, the same way OctoPi now has a life of its own and I am not the only contributor.
The idea was to write a “github for 3D”.
This happened about a year ago.
Since then, I started writing the backend 3D engine. and if feels like anyone who hears about this joins me. My co-worker at Zend, the PHP company, started helping me with the website after I came to him with a javascript question, someone I met in a makerspace, called Ari, has joined to help the business side of things, By then all three of us registered a company in Israel.
The last few month a friend of mine called Yossef, from the Open Data movement in Israel has also joined and we are doing a massive UX redesign which you can’t see yet.
Currently we are in bootstrap, the money we have is money we mainly put in to pay lawyers for the terms of use and privacy policy. And thats it. We are looking for investments, our business model is closed source things cost money, just like github. And we are looking for feedback constantly.
We have day jobs and all the code is written in evenings and weekends.
We belive that if we don’t do this, then in a year or less you will see “app stores” of 3D objects, and the companies behind them will be so big the open source community could not issue any innovation.
I will tell the others we really need an “about us” page.
Good points, @Richard_Horne
Let me make a prallel though: I am not sure I really know github neither. They have an about page (compulsory, true), but check, e.g. this point in their TOS: "GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. "
So we must go also with faith… For github, everyone seems to get for granted that github is your friend and will be forever. We just trust it b/c everyone trust it !
As a skeptic, I know also some programmers that could see a use for “please do not fork me as this early stage of my project, but contribute -or even keep quiet for now-!”.
Or some would love to be able to moderate who can report or interfere (ban or approval before people post feedback).
Who decides and what freedom is left here?
The best of the best for me would be a repository which is backed by a non-profit foundation and that publishes its own source code. This is quite demanding
There’s no reason a for-profit service has to go bad, I like shapedo and youmagine (although I have a hard time remembering the name and that it’s not spelt youmagazine).
But it’s a shame that I still have to search thingiverse as the others are practically empty!
I’d be all for a ‘Piratebay’ style object store. Just pull in everything from all other sites and not give a fuck… At least I’d not have to open 6 tabs to find out which site the thing I’m trying to build was hosted on.
@Guy_Sheffer Thank you, that’s a really great overview and thanks for being so open about it.
Sounds like you are all working hard to make it.
I’m In and wish you the very best with development and building a ShapeDo community. If I can help in any way please let me know.
@Guy_Sheffer thanks! I did not know your link to octopi, hence @foosel … I am sure that if you re-publish this post on shapedo it would help the project twice: to answer Richard questions and also to help Google link to shapedo and help natural referencing! I am in also (well I was already, but not active enough for sure)
@Troy_Sorzano If you have any idea how to do that? It would help. The video is the best promotion we had so far.
Just saying “SEO” is not really helpful.
@ThantiK I use that trick all the time myself.
Copyright laws are actually pretty ok here.
We actually are actually moving that to the company right now.
