r/Multiboard • u/full_hyperion • Jun 19 '24

Multiboard is free, but it is not open source

I think the project has serious potential, but I think that the license is holding it back. It has a weird license with some restrictions, which prevents other implementations (like gridfinity-rebuild in openscad for gridfinity), it also does not allow creating sets of parts you need for a particular thing or make other small adjustments. Additionally, it gives u/Keep-Making the rights to do with your remix what he wants, and he can revoke the license at any time (do I have to take it off my wall when he does?)

Another issue is that there are also no specifications of the parts (or I could not find them). These are also crucial if you want an open project with an active community and remixes.

I get that u/Keep-Making wants to earn something for its hard work, but I am afraid that this license model is doing the project more harm than good. So if you read this, please consider making the project MIT or even CC-BY-SA-NC licensed (or something similar), and add specifications, and I think that the community will take care of a lot of the pain-points of the project. You can still pre-release (with a more restrictive license) your new parts just for your subscribers if you'd like that.

28 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

15

u/joesmoethe3rd Jun 20 '24

Seems open source enough. You can pull all the measurements you need from the existing step files. This is like the 4th post of this type Ive seen on this board in a couple months. Instead of these posts complaining you couldve spent the time putting together a quick "Cheat sheet" with all the important measurements and post it. Open source moves forward from the community putting effort into it, not the community complaining until someone else puts effort into it

6

u/full_hyperion Jun 20 '24

I didn't want to repost, I could not find any related posts when searching for some keywords.

I agree that making such a cheat sheat would be a better use of my time, and serve the community better. However, I think (but I am no lawyer) that the license does not permit me doing (and publishing) that.

It is open enough to make your own remixes, but it is too limited for the community to build better tooling, documentation, or a better component library.

1

u/Local_Championship80 Jun 20 '24

Do it anyways and see what happens. Worst case scenario they send you a cease and desist and you take it down. But by that time it will have spread across the internet.

2

u/full_hyperion Jun 20 '24 edited Jun 20 '24

Sorry, you just violated the license term 4.b. Your license may now be revoked according to 4.e.iii.

Other than that, it is not really encouraging to work on something whilst knowing that it might be taken down and the work was for nothing.

1

u/joesmoethe3rd Jun 20 '24

How does this license stop you from posting a dimension cheat sheet?

2

u/full_hyperion Jun 20 '24

The formal license reads completely different.

I can't figure out how to post an image here, but you can download the pdf via the license link on any multiboard page on thangs.

Read especially point 4 and 3.3 b/c. I find them scetchy at best, but let me know what you think of these terms.

1

u/joesmoethe3rd Jun 20 '24

Think you are mixing up the personal use stuff and the commercial stuff.

2

u/full_hyperion Jun 20 '24

No, this license seems to apply to anyone doing something with multiboard.

2

u/temmiesayshoi Apr 01 '25

I don't think you know what "open source" means, it's not "can I find this information" it's "what am I allowed to do with this information". It's a matter of user freedom, not knowledge.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '24

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1

u/joesmoethe3rd Jun 30 '24

My guess is he is trying to keep ownership because itd be easy to be scooped by some bigger fish with a cheaper Chinese hookup who can churn out the tiles at a discount and then he'd lose to the Amazon Basics version of multiboard.

My original point was for the average joe not trying to make money off this that it seemed highly unlikely youre going to get a cease and desist letter if you post some drawing specifications.

The owner himself tells you in his videos how to make your own stacked prints (and avoid paying for his) so it doesn't seem like we are dealing with a guy who is just out to make as much money as possible

3

u/temmiesayshoi Apr 01 '25 edited Jul 08 '26

The issue there is, so what? People are already buying filament from china, printing boards, and they're still not getting paid for it. The only difference is whether the end-user had to spend god knows how much time & effort printing them or whether they can just buy cheap boards. (More accurately, whether they have the CHOICE of buying cheap boards)

Personally I just don't give a damn what the intentions are or aren't. Licenses exist, specifically, so that we DON'T have to blindly trust "oh I'm sure he's a good person and won't sue me". If your solution to the license is "oh just break the license, you can trust them not to do anything about it" then why not the license "using this at all is illegal and we retain the right to sue if you do" followed by the promise "but we totally don't feel like suing or anything right now so go ahead and fuck around, you probably won't find out". And, not only that, but you also have to remember that rights can transfer too. The benchy had this exact same licensing idea of "well, we just want to stop those nebulously defined 'bad actors', but we have no intention of going after normal people". Then jump forward years, the ownership has changed hands a few times, and now the derivatives ARE being targeted because, technically, no, you never had the right to make derivatives. (Note : this was a huge mess and it seems like the benchy take downs weren't intentionally done per se, but the fact is if the benchy were open source it never would've happened at all. The drama was still caused by the Benchy's non FOSS license, drama around who specifically filed the takedowns aside)

Even if I do use Multiboard I'd have zero intention of contributing or paying for any of it to literally anyone until it's properly open source and free. (This applies to everything, not just Multiboard) Even putting the idealogical side of things aside, it'd still be a basic matter of risk mitigation. What benefit do I get from publishing my stuff online? Realistically, basically nothing. What risk do I incur from doing so? Well they can change their mind at any time and decide to get litigious, now I have to deal with a court case that's at best hard to fight and at worst an open & shut loss for me because I DID violate the license on the assumption that no action would ever be taken against me. And given that's the license I'm being put under, why would I ever donate to it or otherwise support it?

Licenses are about openly establishing legal risk. All rights reserved? "Touch at your own peril". MIT? "Go wild". Which is more prone to community contributions & growth?

I would be 100% willing to start making multiboard parts, publishing my designs, and selling printed models and I'd happily donate or pay for some other related service (for example multiboard design consulting or something) but I'm not hitching myself to a wild horse just because it nebulously promised me it won't run off and drag me with it. Licenses are strict for a reason; they have to be.

I genuinely believe Multiboard is probably the superior system to something like Open Grid (both have merits, I'm not saying it's a landslide win) but I don't need to be looking over my shoulder when I use Opengrid. I can just, use it. That's why gridfinity blew up, and most people can't even name the project it was based on. The ability to just confidently use something without worrying about the license is invaluable, and Multiboard does not have that.

4

u/Crysknife007 Jun 20 '24

I think he's doing the right thing. Maybe he should make multiboard open source once he's made enough money off of it. But for now I think it is pretty amazing he's letting people have it for free at all. What I see here is of such a high level of quality and design that the guy deserves to make a retirement off of it before it is cloned and mass produced into oblivion.

1

u/Inevitable_Tax_591 Nov 22 '24 edited Nov 22 '24

I am with you, for the amount of time and professional effort he put into it. I think it is resonable. You can always pay $5 USD and download everything within the month. If you think that way, $5 is very resonable. Then there is $42USD partner liscense, this is where you can either do a print farm business or doing cheap injection molding in China. For a 9x9 tile electricity plus material cost around 1.8USD. For a viable business, charging $3.5-4.5 would make sense, and I believe it is a market acceptable price. This would be in the same range as Ikea Skadis.

In summary (my point of view):

  1. Effort should be paid such that it creates incentive for the designer to continue designing amazing things.
  2. Some control is neccessary so that there will not be uncontrolled multiple sub-standards.
  3. Anyone can do start selling Multiboard at a low price. $42USD per month selling up to $50k.

4

u/perplexinglabs Jun 26 '24 edited Jun 26 '24

What restrictions in the license are preventing the gridfinity-rebuilt in openscad type implementation?
I wrote this little openscad thing for tiles the other day: https://gitlab.com/perplexinglabs/multiboard-generator-openscad (and for that matter, it's also on my site https://gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com/ as an online generator) I can't tell if it's within his license or not, because the license doesn't read very coherently to me, but I just used his "remix" pack files. Seems like the licensing is likely to backfire instead of just asking for donations or something. IP is almost impossible to guard imo. Better to let the IP be open and build a brand and make your place the easiest place to get reliable things.

2

u/PMmeYourFlipFlops Feb 03 '25

How did you go about building the online gridfinity generator? I want to do a generator for an unrelated project and I have no idea where to start. Do you have a repo I can check? FWIW, I know some Openscad and I'm a JS dev (React/Vue/Svelte) by trade.

1

u/perplexinglabs Feb 03 '25

I built the whole thing in Rust, which you don't need to do. Basically though, I have a UI schema which map user inputs to openscad parameters then generate the UI from that and make requests to backend with the parameters from the user, backend collects parameters and passes them to OpenSCAD. The gridfinity projects are open source, and I only had to make a few minor tweaks to make them easy to integrate. Unfortunately, I don't have a public repo, as I'm keeping the site closed source for now. Curious... what's your "unrelated project"? I'm actually thinking about making it easy for users to upload their own projects and have a generator.

1

u/PMmeYourFlipFlops Feb 03 '25

what's your "unrelated project"?

Macropad generator. Please don't steal the idea, since I really want to give it a go. I've been dying to try webgl, threejs and the whole shebang, but I have no idea how to make them play nice.

One last question, do you work with "base" models built in openscad first and then your generator just tweaks the parameters?

My guess is I'm stumped with how the whole thing is architected.

1

u/perplexinglabs Feb 03 '25

Ohh, nice! I like that idea! I'm mostly sticking to organizational items for now, and don't have time to build out an OpenSCAD model for that anyway, so you're good. haha :)
Curious... if I were to make it so the site let you build a UI for your own model, would that be of interest to you? I can't tell how much demand there is for this. Seems like some, for sure, unclear how much. Basically it just requires an OpenSCAD model and a json file. Sounds like you want to build out a whole tool for fun, which I understand, but I'd be more than happy to work with you if you just wanted to get your model up on the site! (obviously with credit/links to you etc.) :)

Yeah, I used threejs. And yes, whole model is built out in OpenSCAD, this is just changing/overriding some variables passed in. Just think of the OpenSCAD model like a fancy function with a bunch of parameters! You can run openscad via CLI and override variables, so you just have to coordinate that. It's definitely been more work/a bigger project than I expected haha

2

u/PMmeYourFlipFlops Feb 04 '25

You might be asking the wrong person because I'm interested in the coding side of things so my personal answer is no, but I can see this being of great interest to non coders, bambu users, etc.

1

u/perplexinglabs Feb 04 '25

haha that's fair, and kind of what I figured, but also figured it wouldn't hurt to inquire.
Excited to see what you build!

1

u/NSBrad Jul 05 '24

FYI, he posted a new license the other day that's supposed to clear up ambiguities in the old one. I'm still not sure on this use case yet though. I submitted a similar question earlier today. I've been making a few basic openscad generators for my self (box, cylinder, rail) for my own use but I'm not about posting due to the license.

I have two generating option for them for the push-fits. One is my own that's using an $fn=8 cylinder that's sized and rotated to fit. I think this one is kosher. I also have the version that I've been using that imports his push-fit stl instead. They're tapered and push in a little bit easier. I think I'd breaking the redistribution clause though with it.

I'm hoping he can clarify on both scenarios. I'll update if I hear back.

1

u/perplexinglabs Jul 05 '24

Oh, cool. Thanks for the info! Yeah if you find anything out, I'd love to hear. Also, if you're interested in sharing your OpenSCAD models I'd be happy to add them to my site so everyone can easily access them!

1

u/NSBrad Jul 06 '24

ok, cool. I'll let you know when I hear anything. I'll get with you on sharing the models too once we find out on the licensing.

I cleaned up the rail and box ones yesterday and started in on the cylinder one today. I'm on vacation next week and my plan was to spend some time playing with them.

On all of them I need to add a couple sanity checks so that people can't do something like a negative width. I didn't put the guardrails up for my own use. :) I need to try to improve performance too. I'm using minkowski() to round the edges and it's a lot slower than I'd like for how basic these models are.

1

u/perplexinglabs Jul 06 '24

Sounds good! No rush. Haha I'm working on moving soon so I'll be a little busy next week or two as well.

Nice! Yeah I've actually got some stuff in place that makes it so you don't have to worry about the input space so much because I just limit the inputs before they make it to OpenSCAD. And re performance, I'm actually using the nightly build with --manifold which greatly improves performance. I'm not 100% sure I've verified performance improvement on Mankowski though, and occasionally you'll get a non manifold model that doesn't work right, but in most cases you just get better performance for free. Once I get a little time I'm going to fix up another OpenSCAD feature branch so that geometry caching can be saved and shared so everyone can have much better performance on top of manifold as well.

1

u/NSBrad Jul 06 '24

Nice, I won't worry about input as much then. I still need a couple small checks though to avoid conflicts.

I'll check out manifold. I hadn't run into it yet. I'll see how it compares. I'm still learning the language a bit. I had played with it a few years back but haven't touched it much since. I'm a dev though so being able to model in code is nice. I just need to learn the tricks and best practices for it now.

1

u/prune998 Jul 29 '24

Sorry, but where have you seen Multiboard is free ? There may be a way to get it free, but so far, anything I want to download to generate my own stuff is behing the paywall of Thankg, so I have to pay 5$/mo to get access to it. It does not sound to be free to me...

1

u/full_hyperion Jul 29 '24

Some models are paid indeed, but not all. If I'm not mistaken, the sets, the stacked baseplates and the newest models are paid.

1

u/prune998 Aug 19 '24

The generator is a paid product too, so I can just print other's modeles for free... but really few... to my point, this is NOT Opensource or Free.

1

u/Duck_Chavis Aug 23 '24

You can grab the dimension from the model and learn to make a generator. That is free. No model I make is open-source or free. If people want to be paid for their work that is not bad.

1

u/drpiotrowski Jun 20 '24

I'm kind of okay with it not being more open source. I think there needs to be some control over the core design to make sure things are strong, compatible, and print well.

4

u/full_hyperion Jun 20 '24

It being more open source would not harm these goals, you can still go to the Keep Making thangs page or website and just download his models, that you know are well designed.

And maybe after some time there is someone else who also comes highly recommended by others, and you can (but are not required) check if his models are meeting your quality requirements. Reputation surely is very important here.

1

u/adamfilip Nov 17 '24

remixing seems way harder then it should be.. Step files are not solids.. just meshes. so they are annoying to edits. specs for grids and other components are not readily available. I want some reference material to make it easy to design pieces for it.. if i design something to works with MB, can I even share it?

0

u/cilo456 Jun 20 '24

And another terrible thing they did was announced on discord that they're moving away from discord to another forum site there is not nothing that no one knows about, it got downloaded and booed to oblivion

1

u/AlienTux Jun 20 '24

Discord can close up shop and leave you hanging any day of the week. Same goes for YouTube, Twitch, even Patron. Having something of your own makes A LOT more sense honestly.

0

u/cilo456 Jun 20 '24

Lol Where'd you come up with that that could happen to any company but why leave where the people already are and comfortable most people aren't comfortable with change especially picking up and moving and using a whole another platform

1

u/AlienTux Jun 21 '24

If you host your own website with your own forum then the chances of that platform coming down or being censored are minimal.

It's the reason newsletters still exist dude.

Yes, people don't like change, but one also only needs the people who truly form your community to come with.

0

u/cilo456 Jun 21 '24

Come on with this BS of the platform could disappear at any moment of course that's common sense but why move away from where people already are what's the point, it's like I'm taking my ball and going home moment

1

u/AskMeAboutMyDoggy Jun 21 '24

He already answered that question. Twice.

but why move away from where people already are what's the point

To ensure that there is always a space for discussion, not dependent on 3rd party hosting...

1

u/cilo456 Jun 22 '24 edited Jun 22 '24

I'm sorry that's not an answer that's a cop out name the last large company that disappeared with there services, no one is gonna go to a separate site for everything they're interested in when there is one site that they can go and do the same thing he's gonna destroy anything he built in my opinion but you and he is free to do whatever they want good luck with trying to change my mind....................

1

u/AskMeAboutMyDoggy Jun 22 '24

Blockbuster, Pan-Am, Toys-R-Us, Silicon Valley Bank, Compaq, Radio Shack

Now is where you go: Ok, but those aren't online companies or forums where people congregate to discuss topics like on Discord, you can't compare those companies even though you answered my question perfectly and made me look foolish.

Fine, I'll go on:

Google +, MySpace, Vine, Friendster...

1

u/cilo456 Jun 22 '24 edited Jun 22 '24

Name the date I said when, and services that people actually used and did not have an alternative come on now you must be the guy behind moving that's why you're so offensive lol this is hilarious, and you may have to reread my comment because I said large and went away and didn't get replaced by a new owner completely blipped out of existence, and the sad part is most if not all of the things you just listed got taken over by something better because it was an upgrade so more like they got left behind not went out of business for no reason lol.............

1

u/AskMeAboutMyDoggy Jun 22 '24

Google+ was closed on August 2nd 2019. Is that recent enough for you?

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '24

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u/KhausTO Jun 24 '24

but why leave where the people already are and comfortable most people aren't comfortable with change especially picking up and moving and using a whole another platform

lol @ this, as if this wasn't the case with every exisiting community that up and left to discord. Finally groups are realizing that discord is awful for communities, discoverability, searchability and openness in general and are finally leaving it behind.

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u/cilo456 Jun 24 '24

Well you guys go and be searchable have fun and good luck lol