I’d like to know more about what’s going on first, but if there’s nothing funny it’s worth donating a few bucks to help keep the lights on and doors open if you think the designs are useful to you and others.
I’ve always been a free stuff fan, but as I’ve become (cough) more mature, and watched a number of well intentioned projects fail have started realizing that all the things we’ve told our kids about the money tree are actually true. There isn’t one. Donations are often a poor model cause hardly anybody gives them, but it’s what they have. Know they get some kickback from the somebody else makes it for you thing.
I spent about $500US on a maslow, $50 +/- on a sheet of plywood, why not toss in a couple bucks for providing and hosting the designs that I’d like to make with it. Plus there’s the pay it forward good feeling.
Now if they go and turned into a buy it from us model, it’s a whole different is it worth it decision. Like buying an Instant Pot, no karma included.
Gosh, the whole soapbox thing is getting out of hand.
Pure dontations are seldom a good business model if you are having to pay people
a living.
But hosting designs should not require that. The cost of hosting is near zero,
you can easily get donations enough to do the site design.
A model that routes purchases to local people to build and deliver them seems
like it should work, (and you should be able to get a cut of the purchase).
Thingiverse seems to operate in this model.
But for any site, you need people to contribute designs, and here OpenDesk seems
to have failed.
NC licenses prevent people from building the design for other people, so you
either need to not do NC, or you need to explicitly dual-license, NC for people
who download it, with an exception to people hired through the site.
And the sad part is that NC, like locks, only keep the honest people honest.
There’s way too much effort lost on open source license nitpicking. I like the ones that say “at least mention me”. My minor open source efforts are all “you’re welcome to it, might explode in your face, use at your own risk”. Any reward is seeing somebody else find a little value and hopefully smile a little, the rest is the fun of making it
Hey guys. I noticed this the other day looking to download the fin lockers. Got around it by just hitting google and typing in “opendesk fin lockers download”. Turns out the download pages and mechanism are still up, but you can’t hit them via the normal site navigation. So, the first result is a direct link to the download page for the fin lockers and I’m able to download the files like normal. Seems to work for everything on opendesk.
@matuvu, Unfortunately, even though “open source” is pretty clearly defined and accepted as having the criteria of commercial use, there’s a lot of business that like to “open wash” their value proposition by claiming they’re open source when they’re not. I try to use “free/libre” to try and leave no ambiguity.
Open Desk is not as bad as some, as they do have a large portion of their design files under a free/libre license, either CC-BY or CC0 as far as I can tell, but they also provide many design files under a CC-BY-NC license. It seems like they’re further gatekeeping access to their design files, free/libre or no, by forcing login and requiring an email request for access.
@hodgeac, Thanks for the heads up! It turns out that appending “/download” to almost all of the links drops you into the download page. I think you’re right in that they kept the functionality there but removed all links pointing into the download page.
I’ve gone through all of the designs that I’m able to access from the Open Desk site and collected all design files that are available under a free/libre license under my GitHub account:
There are also links to the appropriate pages on the Open Desk site for each of the designs as well as what license they’re under. Everyone should feel free to copy and distribute them as they’re under an appropriate license to do so. If people are interested, I’d also be happy to convert to other file formats other than the DXF provided.
In case anyone is coming to this page in search of Open Desk designs, here’s a table of the free/libre designs taken from the above link:
Anybody have any recent experiences with OpenDesk?
Looks like many/all the designs are still “offline”
I’m looking for the designs for the Studio desk, if anybody has them, let me know.
My email exchange with support has been unproductive.
Thanks for getting in touch. Our MIY file downloads are currently unavailable whilst we make changes to our system. We hope to have them back online soon but we cannot provide you with a specific timeframe at this moment.
I don’t have much experience with SketchUp models, but when I tried to open using the free online version, the imported models were not decomposable. So it would be difficult to measure/deconstruct the dimensions for all the parts.
I tried flat out asking for OpenDesk to send me the “older” version of the plans, they said,
I’m afraid I can’t send you anything until the updates are complete. We are actually updating the files as part of the changes so I’m afraid you will need to wait until we reactivate them on our website.
Definitely smells less open source.
Makes me wonder if the updates they are working on are license changes and mechanism for enforcement/drm.
I am not familiar with sketchup either but a friend of mine that sent me that link is and said that it is a 3-D environment and if the file is a 3-D model that is not separated into individual parts, which it sounds like that is the case from what you were saying, then it will take a lot of manual work selecting lines to try and deconstruct the model manually. Of course, the goal is to have all of the individual parts laid out in 2-D then you can use an SVG plug-in for sketchup to convert that to an SVG.
I think it’s really strange that they took down all of their download files….kinda defeats the purpose of the original mission in the first place… Either way luckily I just found 99% of these files after a long search and would not have been able to find them if it wasn’t for your repository (had to learn the naming format). So thank you!! Please add these files to your repo so we can make sure that Maslow users still have access to these awesome open source plans.
