What should have become a bountiful forest instead becomes a single bonsai tree in a walled garden. Expansion and further development of Hangprinters won’t happen unless the gatekeepers care to allow it.
OPEN SOURCE RIP PRINT SOFTWARE LICENSE
With the patent in place, we’d have to pay license fees to a tiny minority, gatekeepers of the stolen vital technology. As they note, this is an unfortunate turn of events: The Hangprinter team has launched a GoFundMe to try to challenge the patent, but it’s an expensive process.
OPEN SOURCE RIP PRINT SOFTWARE FREE
But now it’s under patent, even as the creators tried to make this open and free to the world. For example, here is an image from 2017 of the creators working on Hangprinter:Įither way, it’s pretty clearly the same basic thing.
Ludvigsen walks step by step through how the patent drawings almost seem like they were drawn from public images of Hangprinter. Earlier this year, they were awarded US Patent 11,230,032 for a “cable-driven additive manufacturing system.”Įxcept that, as Ludvigsen points out, there is a ridiculous amount of prior art on basically everything in the UT-Battelle patent, not just from Hangprinter, but from some other projects as well. UT-Battelle, a non-profit joint venture set up by the University of Tennessee and the Battelle Institute to operate the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, apparently decided to step in and basically patent the core ideas of the Hangprinter. From the beginning, the idea behind Hangprinter, from its creator, Torbjørn Ludvigsen, was to make it open source and freely available for anyone to make use of it.Īnd, of course, sooner or later, someone took advantage of that. Hangprinter is a fascinating project to create an open source frameless 3D printing setup that literally hangs in the air and is able to build much larger things than a traditional 3D printer. That appears to be the situation that has now happened to Hangprinter. Because someone else might just come along and patent it themselves.
One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this actually makes it ridiculously difficult for any project that wants to do something innovative and donate it to the world, without patents. We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. Fri, Jun 24th 2022 07:39pm - Mike Masnick
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