Do you want to make money off of your 3D printable file?
http://3dlt.com/
Models should be free as in speach
Would you rather benefit a small group of people and get money or a large group for free? Being nice to people is worth more than money. At least that’s how I see it
Yes on fairy island everybody does everything for free and people coexist happily. Unfortunately the world is largely capitalist (since we’re too bad at organization to do much else) and therefore people need money to eat.
To say that models should be free as a blanket statement is stupid. Models of proprietary machines that cost millions to perfect shouldn’t be free. Nobody would ever develop anything expensive if there weren’t a chance of getting their money back.
Just like linux ,android ,reprap , or apache ? The best things most popular things are open-source.
I do agree that people need to eat and make money but I don’t think models are the way to do it. I was 16 when started modeling and gave them all away for free and when I do that people help me out in amazing ways way more valuable than the money’s worth. Think of others before your self and amazing things happen
You only model part time though, and as a teen you have all your necessities (and probably most of your unnecessary wants) covered by your parents. Of course all your stuff will be free, you don’t need the money and in any case your designs probably wouldn’t sell very well. However if somebody designed, say, a replacement drive train for a performance car which could be produced via lost wax casting of 3d printed parts, it would be entirely reasonable to expect payment for that.
edit: Thought of a way to put into words where I was going with the drive train analogy. The scale of a project is important when you’re deciding whether or not it’s profitable. Designing a new extruder probably takes 30 hours(random number, don’t be offened Prusa and other hard working designers!) if you already know what you want to do with it. Plus, it’s building largely on prior works. It probably doesn’t make sense to try to sell that design, because it’s only sort of your idea anyway, and it didn’t take too horribly long.
Now the drive train would probably take several hundred hours to design, plus testing multiple prototypes to make sure it doesn’t destroy your engine. Furthermore, there aren’t any 3d printable drive trains out right now. If somebody did this it would be entirely new and they would have put a lot of work into it. I see no reason for them not to profit on it.
Then we have the RepRap project, which probably has hundreds of thousands of man hours in it at this point. There’s no way any one person could do this, and the people who started it couldn’t really afford to get it where it is today as a for profit venture. The logical thing to do with it was post this huge over arching goal online and collaborate. The same goes for linux and pretty much every big open source project. The important part about these two is that they’re big. If some guy said “Hey everybody lets design a printable drive train for my MX-5, here’s a wiki for you. Have at it.” nobody would have done it. A drive train for that one car isn’t real important to most people, so if he tried to do it like RepRap it would never get done. Thus if we want this printable drive train to ever be real, he has to do it alone. If he’s doing all that work alone, he’d better make some money off it or only rich people will be able to take on these projects.
Lastly you have stuff like the designing the F-35 and space travel, which ordinary citizens simply cannot do. At this scale, governments or large corporations have to fund the project if it’s going to get done because lots of people need to spend lots of time on it, and those people need to eat.
I guess all I’m saying is that there are some projects that won’t get done your way either because of lack of mass appeal or simple difficulty. Of course anything that can should be free, but not everything can.