Not being mean spirited, but I suspect NTI’s lawyers looked at it and decided that the benchy wasn’t worth trying to defend in court. That horse had left the barn long ago. And it will buy some good will for at least a little while.
Comment on 3DBenchy Sets Sail into the Public Domain
nucleative@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Smart move by the new owner, anything else would have looked out of touch
bluewing@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I kind of expected this. The company didn’t choose to be dicks about it in the first place, and it’s not like Benchy was even a commercial product to begin with. It was cutesy branding that only had a no-derivatives license because the original author was concerned about preserving its utility as a benchmark. But md5 will already do that particular trick if it’s really necessary.
The new owner gained nothing by keeping the more stringent license, and had more to gain in goodwill by releasing it to the public domain.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That, and the inevitable avalanche of community recreations of the basic shape that followed threatened to doom the original to irrelevance anyway.
Trying to tell 3D printing and CAD nerds you can’t make [object] is a fool’s errand, because enough people with time on their hands will just reverse engineer your [object], possibly improve upon it in the process, and post it everywhere to be given away.