Proprietary lock-in.

This phrase from Appendix A tells you all you need to know about the
patent licensing: "on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms".
If the FRAND patent model worked, the mobile phone and tablet industry
would be a happy garden of mutual innovation, rather than a dismal swamp
of litigation.

The broad exceptions in Item 3 of Option 2 tells you that anything you
create will be deemed infringing, because you'll be innovating in a
related field that's not covered by the FRAND license. The only question
will be whether you have enough money to make you a worthwhile target.

I. Am. Not. A. Lawyer.

--
Ed
softsolder.com

I haven't read the 3MF format spec, but it sounds superficially a lot like
AMF, with maybe a few additional features. AMF is also an XML based format,
which means it is easily extensible. Microsoft could have used or extended
AMF, but my experience with Microsoft and standards committees is that they
don't like to play in other people's sandboxes. They generally want to own
the sandbox.

We have a lot of Windows users, so it's possible that at some point, there
could be user demand for the ability to import/export 3MF. Microsoft will
want us to support this feature, in terms of their overall goals for 3MF,
so it's unlikely that they would sue us for implementing 3MF import/export.
Yes, I know it doesn't work that way for open source projects implementing
audio/video codecs, but I think this is different. Microsoft wants to use
3D printer support as a new way to drive people to use Windows, and they
won't succeed if they demand licensing fees from every open source project
that tries to support their 3D printer interface. And I think they
understand that.

I am also not a lawyer.

On 1 May 2015 at 10:50, Ed Nisley ed.nisley@pobox.com wrote:

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 11:28 AM, doug moen doug@moens.org wrote:

I have zero interest in supporting a vendor-extended "standard".

If Microsoft wants to lead the pack, they have to open this up.  Period.

Exactly.

Ditto.

-ethan

Microsoft will sue or threaten to sue whoever they like for whatever
reasons they like if they calculate it benefits their "shareholder
value". It's not even to condemn them for it. They are US a corporation.
It is their duty to their shareholders to do so.

Big US corporations also understand that if they get around to having some
proxy company sue people once the standard is well established they win.

I'm just a cynic but I would get close to a Microsoft "standard",
especially a FRAND one approximately the way you'd get close to someone
with ebola.

Alan

It's not FRAND. Option 2 is "RAND-RF (Royalty-Free)", which is different.

In the parent document it says "3MF members have agreed to make their
necessary patent claims available for implementations of the 3MF Core
Specification and 3MF Materials Specification on a royalty-free basis."

The wording you object to means basically something like this: "if your
software already violated our patents, independent of 3MF, then adding 3MF
support to your software doesn't eliminate the prior patent infringement".

I don't advocate living in fear of uknown patents. Refusing to implement
3MF because we don't like Microsoft is one thing, and could be a legitimate
community decision. But I don't see that 3MF support would create any legal
risk for us. The point of the royalty-free patent grant is to eliminate
that risk, after all.

On 1 May 2015 at 10:50, Ed Nisley ed.nisley@pobox.com wrote:

On 05/01/2015 04:16 PM, doug moen wrote:

Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory.

They can omit "Fair" from the acronym if they like, I suppose, but ...

Some background on why FRAND remains a minefield:

http://patentlyo.com/patent/2015/02/amends-patent-policy.html

--
Ed
softsolder.com

FRAND, as you describe it, is option 1 of Appendix A. The option used by
3MF is option 2, which is royalty free.

FRAND is a minefield because you have to pay license fees for implementing
the standard, and the negotiations over that have led to law suits, as
described by your link. But 3MF uses a royalty-free model in which you
don't pay license fees for implementing the standard.

On 1 May 2015 at 16:55, Ed Nisley ed.nisley@pobox.com wrote:

Thanks for summarizing what I’ve been mulling over in my head.

I’m going to comment+close the Issue with something to this effect.

Andrew.

On 05/02/2015 05:29 AM, MichaelAtOz wrote:

Right, I agree the functionality would be much more useful than just
another import/export format. But then I think the effort spent on a
simple exporter would be not too big, I guess the biggest thing is to
find a nice cross platform solution to read/write the ZIP file (which
would come in useful for AMF handling too).

Still, I guess the best strategy for now is to sit back, fetch some
popcorn and watch what happens :-).

ciao,
Torsten.

The DRM relevant features of the spec are all optional, the only required
part is the 3D model. So I think a conformant implementation need not
process any DRM.

I understand there is great suspicion of Microsoft, but in my reading 3MF
is a genuinely open spec, there are no strings attached. It actually makes
clear it is royalty free, unlike AMF. It also can be freely downloaded,
unlike AMF which costs $49 and you have to agree to inspection of your
premises and computer systems by a third party to ensure you are complying
with the copyright (i.e. not made ANY copies), otherwise the agreement is
cancelled and you must destroy all copies.

Personally I find it a lot easier to implement 3MF than AMF.

On 27 May 2015 at 08:02, frankv drifter.frank@gmail.com wrote:

The only version of the AMF spec that I've studied is the 0.47 draft from
this URL:

http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/AMF_V0.47.pdf

If there are substantive differences in the $49 version, I have no way of
finding about them. The legal risks involved in obtaining the actual
standard sound too high. If I create a context diff comparing 0.47 with
1.0, I'm breaking the law. On the other hand, most of the other people
implementing AMF are probably also basing their implementation on V0.47, so
whatever text happens to be in the pay version of the AMF standard probably
doesn't matter all that much.

I agree that Microsoft has done a better job, in making their standard
freely available and explicitly royalty free.

On 27 May 2015 at 05:28, Bob Cousins bobcousins42@googlemail.com wrote:

Von: "doug moen" doug@moens.org

Actually there are some details that are fairly important for interoperability
across different programs. In general the file structure is pretty well
explained in Wikipedia and most information (especially the XML schema is
freely available).
Also Hod Lipson, technical contact and ASTM F42 Task group chair is pretty
helpful and also answers specific questions in the google group. Unfortunately
he failed to convince others to make the specification freely available.
This is likey an ASTM/ISO issue and not related to the actual specification,
but still it's hugely annoying.

released spec version. Last time I looked, the netfabb implementation did
not follow the specification regarding the actual file storage when using
ZIPed format.

I can't see much difference there and AMF is pretty trivial when ignoring
the curved triangles (where I'm still not convinced that's extremely useful,
especially due to the fixed 5 level recursion, but I might be wrong here
as I did not dig into the details).

And basic AMF support is already implemented, the export is included in
the release version. The restrictions are mainly coming from limitations
present in current OpenSCAD and are not related to AMF.

ciao,
Torsten.

Well, an XML reader/writer is cake to drop in if you wanted to; I suspect
the non-gcc part made liberal use of Windows-only stuff.

--Joseph Lenox

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Torsten Paul Torsten.Paul@gmx.de wrote:

On 07/23/2015 07:38 PM, Joseph Lenox wrote:

Sort-of, yes. It uses the OPC stuff which 3MF is based on, so it gets
most of the XML / ZIP / Packaging infrastructure for free.
(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd371025%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

They did model the C++ interface after COM but according to the docs
it's only "A COM-like DLL Interface" which would work without the COM
magic.

ciao,
Torsten.