Contributing models made in Onshape

Layout 3D Models
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Hi, sorry for taking a few days on this. Mojca and Naib mostly covered it, but here is our official position:

Per librarian group decision, for the moment, we only take in models that meet the following criteria:

  1. They are made by the contributor from scratch (or, in very rare cases that require individual approval, made previously and relicensed to our somewhat unusual library license). Our license is not exactly identical to CC-BY-SA 4.0 - it also carries an exception that removes obligations when the model is used in a design. This means we cannot use even CC-BY-SA models directly unless the author consents to relicensing under our specific license. This is the main reason we do not want anything made elsewhere to be resubmitted.

  2. They are either generated or have matching source files in preferred editable format. This is for for three reasons:
    a) To ensure 1.
    b) To be able to modify and re-export if there are errors, if we need to make a derived part, or if our packaging requirements or format requirements change. Notably, we’re in the middle of a long transition from scaled WRL+STEP to only STEP, and this will likely require changes to some face colors and material settings down the road. This is a pain to do without original source.
    c) to be able to more easily make measurements for verification.
    If the original source can go away because it’s on someone else’s computer and we can’t store it in our repositories, then this disqualifies it as source.

  3. They are something our librarian team can review. We currently have a FreeCAD expert among the librarians. We do not have people skilled with Solidworks, Onshape, or Fusion on the librarian team at the moment, so we can’t accept contributions in these formats until that changes. We prefer FreeCAD due to philosophy and open format, but also because we know we can always open and edit FreeCAD files in the future. With other software, editing older files does not always work and often making the edit is destructive as it saves in newer versions so we need to maintain an up to date licensed version of the software. We could make an exception to the FreeCAD requirement for parts made in software that we have a reviewer for, and we have sometimes done that for OpenSCAD parts, but they are rather annoying to work with given our export formats are not supported directly. We currently have a number of parts in the review queue that we can’t move forward with because they are made in incompatible software, and we’d like to avoid adding more unless there is a realistic pathway to including them. Having parts in the review queue that are blocked by policy is frustrating to both librarians and contributors.

We have occasionally made exceptions to this for vendors where the vendor themselves offer to relicense some models to match our library license. We do this very rarely as it’s an enormous pain to maintain such models.

Onshape is disqualified on multiple counts here - we have no reviewer skilled in operating it, files can go away at any point, onshape itself can go away at any point, and we have no good workflow for exporting from it. This can change in the future but would require Onshape to change their policy on how they store files, and someone skilled in Onshape to join the library team. Given that combination of events cannot be predicted to happen in the foreseeable future, we would rather not have these contributions in the library before we can process them. Sorry!

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@Cameron_Urban ^ I hope the above answers your question

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@kliment Thank you for the work tracking this down and for the thoughtful response. This does indeed answer my question!

It might be a good idea to update KLC with the rule that currently only FreeCAD models will be reviewed, until a librarian joins who has experience in other formats, be they open or closed-source. Hopefully that will prevent people from filling up your queue with un-reviewable SolidWorks or Autodesk files :blush:

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Many people make their stuff available on places like Gitlab and Github. Easily searchable. I believe one person even collects spice models that can’t be incorporated into Kicad in such a manner.

I’m not advocating a collection though. As long as the search engines work any publicly accessible place works. Decentralization may be best. Once you collect too much you are more likely to be an infringement target. Risk is probably low on models, but you never know. Law schools turn out more than employment dictates. Some turn to debt collection and copyright infringement on a bounty basis. Target size matters. But, this isn’t the entertainment industry either. :wink:

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Well, it does allow you to add arbitrary string metadata so it could indeed have a license in the file. But how readable that is is another question

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I think the problem is more about verifying the license. STEP models are widely available “free to download” with no license or unsuitable licenses for redistribution. Without a way of generating the STEP model again from a source that is clearly licensed, it is hard to prove whether or not a model is actually OK to distribute (vs. for example, someone downloading a STEP file from a manufacturer and sticking the right license text into it)

I think ultimately this comes down to the goals/purpose of the KiCad library project – it’s more important to have data in the library that is both verified correct and verified OK to distribute, than to have a larger number of models in the library by violating one or the other of those standards.

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Sure I am not disputing that. Although nothing guarantees that a freecad file is license unencumbered either.

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