An article came out on Hackaday about our recently-released Knob design. It’s a very generous take on our design (thanks to Matt Varian for his writeup!). The discussion in the comments was a bit less charitable.
A question cropped up there that made me think. It boiled down to this: are STEP files actually open-source?
To be clear, we do not release our actual design files for our mechanical designs. We export our actual design files to a STEP format and release those. So, those who criticize us for not releasing our design files are correct.
The question remains: are STEP files open-source?
STEP files are modifiable in every mechanical design modeling software that I’ve ever used or heard of. It’s an industry standard, and I believe that it’s for a good reason.
Crucially, STEP files are modifiable in a modeling software that is, itself, completely open-source: FreeCAD.
That means that anybody with a computer and mechanical design experience is completely unrestricted in acquiring our design and modifying it.
Additionally, STEP files don’t require specialized expertise to modify. The expertise required to modify a STEP file is the same level of baseline expertise required to modify a design of any format.
Is it going to be familiar to someone who has only ever done animations in Maya, or a civil engineer who’s mechanical design softwares focus on beam calculations? No, of course not. But that’s not the point.
There is no format in existence that would make our designs familiar to every single person who might modify our design. None. If that was our goal, the only option would be to model our designs in every software and release all of those design files.
The point is this: we believe that doing modifications to any mechanical design requires a baseline level of expertise, and that anybody who possesses this baseline level of expertise has the freedom to modify our STEP files.
It might not be easy or familiar, but it’s possible, and requires no additional expertise to do.
But just how easy or hard is it? That’s not a question that can be answered objectively.
Looking through the Ploopy Mods Index as well as printables.com’s archive of Ploopy mods, I count at least thirty individually-contributed mods of our STEP files.
That is quite a few people who have proven through their contributions that the STEP files are meaningfully modifiable. It doesn’t definitively answer the question of how easy or hard it is, but it provides a signal – a strong signal, I believe.
To recap:
It’s my opinion that STEP files are meaningfully open-source. They’re freely modifiable by anybody, particularly because FreeCAD is available. They don’t require specific expertise to use. And dozens of people have used our STEP files to make meaningful modifications.
Here is what I think this all boils down to: open-source means free as in freedom, not free as in beer. STEP files provide liberties. They make things possible that otherwise would be difficult or insurmountable.
Are STEP files easy or convenient? Not necessarily, no. But open-source makes no promises or guarantees about that. Free hardware might have costs associated with it, but open-source is truly about freedom.