I’m not sure what I’m trying to achieve by this post, I think it’s just a bit of a vent really.
I think the levels of corporate copying or lack of ethics shall we say, in the 3d printing world have reached some sort of crescendo. This is not a fanboy vs fanboy rant - it is Prusa defensive probably but only because that’s where I hang out.
Everyone gets inspiration from everyone else that’s fair, and I’m not talking about the whole open source copying without acknowledgment thing, or even in a few cases of late copyrighting open source stuff, but I really didn’t expect Creality to write to me at my Prusa account offering me substantial rewards to bring my stuff over to its site. I’d be flattered if I thought they meant it, or they’d actually written to me at my email address, and I might even have been interested if someone hadn’t just picked up a couple of my models and posted them there. (To be fair they wer instantly removed.)
Now Bambu is getting in on the model library act, and I know that web design isn’t exactly proprietary, but to just download someone else’s template and change the colour seems a bit off to me.
I don’t know why I’m so put out - I guess I just wonder if they are so blatant and open with this what are those company’s attitudes to me as a consumer?
Or am I just a bit touchy this morning? (Image stolen from the site formerly known as Twitter)
I have seen this. I can’t help but wonder if it is a framework they are both using.
Look at our docs and my shop. MKDOCS is extremely popular, and Shopify is by far the largest web shop available. Even when you put a template on top the best you can do is change the color and some images.
If Prusa wrote that framework for themselves then yes that is just lame on Bamoo’s part, but if they are using a backend framework it is no big deal. It is so similar I can not be sure. I am carfull not to jump the gun on this. Is it something similar to duzuki or mkdocs?
For background, I left a company for telling me to copy another companies edits to the T, I refused, my job was subbed out internationally and I quit because I did not want to work for a company that could not spend 10 minutes in one of the many meetings to come up with a look of their own.
Somewhat related: Personally, I’ve pondered on how much work constitutes allowing calling my work “original” when it was based on, or drew inspiration, from something prior by someone else, and I have often labelled something as a “remix” (with credit / link to original), even when I created every single polygon from scratch with no real match to original (only some inspiration), and even when I sometimes called my work original, if it was based on any inspiration from some other work, I tried to mention and give credit. I may have failed at this at some instance, but that would be rare, and giving credit is my goal.
I am sure that it is, and every company is “entitled” for what of a better word to gain inspiration from the good things that others are doing - that’s how the world moves on.
In this case it seems imprudent at best to use the exact same template from the company you have stated is your biggest opposition! I worked in China for many years and love the place and the people, and I suspect this is very much a case of “imitation being the sincerest form of flattery”. People in the Bambu office would be scratching their heads in puzzlement at the fuss - such is the genuine cultural divide.
That is truly admirable but it sometimes becomes very difficult to do that - there is a very very fine line in some instances between what constitutes a remix and what is a new and novel idea.
I’ve had a few instances where I’ve uploaded an original model that I designed to solve a particular purpose, and much later have found an identical or nearly so object uploaded years earlier.
I think a great example of this is your magnetic touch plate base which has been re-imagined by @Peter_M and myself (in my case without knowing of the existence of yours until after the event) is that copying?
It may not be copying, but it’s also not an original idea if someone else had it first!
The manner in which open source software is treated by some companies is another can of worms.
I don’t pretend to understand the nuances here, but I know that some companies clearly just cut and paste without contributing anything. I “think” Bambu’s behaviour is at least a little better than that, but yes some companies have apparently been applying for patents of variations of open source stuff too.
I’m pretty sure we’re seeing some sort of evolution here with the true open source ideal being muddied somewhat by questionable ethics. I don’t care who is right and who is wrong and who has the moral high ground.
I am just a bit saddened by it all, and how little consumers care about anything but the end price.
I will say, not really the topic of this thread, but I personally like the name Bamoo, instead of Bambu.
I know it’s a simple autocorrect issue, or it was in my mind, but I like the name better.
Not that I think the printer isn’t good, I personally have no experience or opinion of it. But the “new name” did make me laugh, as I’m watching O-hi-o struggle against the fighting Irish.
Which if there’s any Ducks fans reading, thanks for being the first team to stop the crazy talk. It was fun for the first two weeks. Week three I was over it, hopefully someone will quiet down and focus where they should now.
Griping about websites reminded me of when I almost left Disney after my boss (twice removed) asked me to whip up something to get around ad-blockers. A) It wasn’t my job domain (I was head of tech support, not web dev), and B) No, just no. Of course, this was the same guy who would call me, half drunk from the airport lounge, because there was a Kenneth C in management, and he’d get our names confused. He also got sacked when it came to light he had his girlfriend (who was not an employee) basically running all the numbers for year-end compensation adjustments and bonuses. He was also one of those useless C-suites who insisted that everyone be placed into an A/B/C basket, and you gave raises to the A’s , berated the B’s, and canned the C’s, regardless of any actual performance or contextual factors. Basically, grading on a curve with people’s livelihoods.
There are lots of website frameworks out there. When I worked in hosting, I had gotten to where I could decipher a few of them by just looking at the development tab in a browser.
If I am not mistaken, I think PrusaSlicer is taken from Slic3r, which was open source with their “Prusa” make on it. Would not be surprised if Bambu just used the Slic3r code and made a few tweaks and slapped their name on it. But I could also be very wrong about that!
PrusaSlicer did start as a fork of Slic3r. However PrusaSlicer has evolved much beyond Slic3r’s capabilities, and Prusa has invested significant development in it.
It’s not that I think that forking an open source project and continuing development on it and rebranding it is an issue. PrusaSlicer is very open about their Slic3r roots, and also very open about when they take an idea from Cura and implement it as well, etc.
My understanding from others, as I have not used Bambu Studio myself, is that it is nothing more than a rebrand so they can have their name on it, with no added features/development.
I have not looked into it as I really have no intention of using Bambu Studio, but have heard many others criticize it.
Bambu are certainly within their rights to do so based on the license, however, personally I think it’s better for everyone now that PrusaSlicer is very well known and used, to invest any development effort they need to just have their printers work very well with PrusaSlicer.
To me, having yet another, almost identical slicer, purely for the reasons of branding, doesn’t benefit the overall 3D Printing community.
I can see how from a manufacture’s perspective that they see an open license and say “hey we should put our logo on it”. It is not all that different from adding a minor machine specific config tweak. Unless you follow close and read blog posts you would not know where any of the features came from, internally, cura, or just been there since slic3r. There isn’t attribution in the front end so who would know. A hardware company is not going to dig to deep into software if they don’t have to.
So is a new license in order, “no rebranding unless you have made significant changes to the functionality”? I think that would be awesome.
To be honest, at first I could not figure out why prusa forked slic3r and didn’t just directly contribute. In the end I have concluded it was because development is fast when you do not need to wait for approval for your pull requests. Same thing with Marlin, they forked it and made their own edits, Marlin just pulls them back in eventually so they have stayed fairly congruent.
I am not saying it is right, I just think it is all so muddy now it would be very hard to come in fresh, and figure out the history of these things, hardware or software. I bet half the world thinks an I3 is a clone of the creality, not the other way around. There are more creality clones (extrusion based) than I3’s. So logically I would assume creality was the genesis. I mean, look at Amazon or Ali looks like everyone is trying to copy creality not the other way around.
That said the more this happens the worse it will get. I do feel like the amount of people making a big deal about this is dwindling. At the same time the license allows it and changing a logo doesn’t change the functionality, why would many people say anything?
I think there’s a trademark issue here. There’s a Bamboo brand of graphics tablets, so I’m guessing Bambu Labs had to shuffle the spelling to avoid infringing.
I think something got lost in translation Tom.
Ryan made me laugh, with his spelling error, that I’m sure was either accidental or caused by autocorrect.
I know the brand name is Bambu.
I could be wrong, but I don’t feel naming a 3D printer after an invasive plant is the best name.
But Bamoo made me laugh, as something resembling a cow came to mind.
Maybe I was just in a mood, and looking for something to smile at.
There’s another great example of cultural divide. In the Bambu country of manufacture, bamboo is an amazingly useful and incredibly adaptable resource!
On a similar but unrelated note, how did the Pajero ever come into being and does the vehicle reflect the habits of their pilots?
I wonder what came first - did aggressive road behaviour drive all those macho vehicle names? (Ram, Charger, Explorer, Everest, Renegade) or did the names contribute to the behaviour?
Oh how I long for simpler, quieter times when we all drove Tiaras, and Starlets, and Bluebirds!
We never got those here. Well, we did but people never knew that was what they were driving. The car dealers got these cars and thought they’d never sell them with those names, so they sold by model designations instead. Datsun/Nissan were the biggest offenders there. The Bluebird sold as a 910. The Sylvia sold as a 240S and the Fair Lady sold as a 280Z (well several different numbers, too.) More recent Toyotas sold under the Lexus badge also got model number designations from less agressive monnikers. It seems that the eastern naming sense doesn’t teanslate well to the west. We seem to like our simulated mechanical violence.
I remember an anime (the title escapes me at the moment) where four characters were named: Sylvia, Celica, Integra and Accella. I laughed when I heard that and had to explain to non-car people. They knew (Toyota) Celica and (Honda/Acura) Integra, but not Sylvia (Nissan 240S) nor Accella (Mazda 3) I just thought it was funny that it was the 90s era midsize sporty models from four different major Japanese car manufacturers… (Oh yeah. “Solty Rei”)
Oh well, I may as well keep this thread going…
I rarely visit XTwitter because it takes only one or two posts to make me angry, and I prefer to spend my time having fun.
So I dropped in on FaecesBook today for the first time in ages (My bad… I’m supposed to admin for a couple of largish groups!) and stumbled across this.
Having had my models “borrowed” and been contacted to tell me so in the aforementioned spam campaign, I’m on my high horse, my soap box if you will and immediately decide I will never buy anything from those companies.
Then I immediately turn around and start looking with interest at a Creality Laser, hypocrisy would appear to be in my genes!
